By Jake Hibbard , Staff Writer

Finding an answer for how to clean oil out of water turned out to be as easy as thinking in terms of soft drinks.

Andy Hong, a civil and environmental engineering professor, built a device that can clean a quart of oil-contaminated water by using pressurized ozone gas bubbles. The process of applying pressure followed by depressurization, for which Hong has a patent pending, fills the polluted water with bubbles and creates a reaction similar to opening a soda can too quickly, Hong said. The process separates the oil from the water through sand filtration.

The method lowers oil contamination in water to about 10 parts-per-million, which cleans water enough to remove the colorful sheen that oil leaves in dirty water, Hong said. Finding a way to decontaminate water to a level low enough to remove the sheen has been difficult in the past. He said the method is inexpensive and hopes refineries and other industrial businesses will use it to purify their water.

Hong combined two existing purifying methods8212;sand filtration and ozone bubbling8212;and improved the ozone-bubbling process, said Lee Siegel, U science spokesman.

Before Hong discovered this method, ozone bubbling had been used to decontaminate water but had never been used in a repeated process of applying and removing pressure.
Once the device is built, Hong said he is going to test his method on a larger scale in Wuxi, China. The new cleaning device will be designed to treat 53 gallons of contaminated water.
“We think the chemical reaction will happen just the same,” Hong said.

He said he expects the time it will take to purify the water will be the same as it was for the one-quart device. The most important part of the new test will be to see if the new device can withhold the repeated process of adding and removing pressure, he said.

If the test in China is a success, Hong said he wants to make a device large enough to purify up to 260,000 gallons of water at a time.

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courtesy University of Utah Civil and environmental engineering

Professor Andy Hong developed a method for cleaning up oil sheen and other pollutants after they are released into water. Hong?s method uses repeated cycles of pressurizing and depressurizing ozone to create microscopic bubbles to remove the oil.