This bikini cleans water as people swim
Future bikinis may clean up oceans with every swim. That is definitley a bikini that I need when I’m swimming at my local beach, Scheveningen in The Hague, The Netherlands.
Anyway, this sexy bikini called the Sponge Suit is swimwear made from a novel material that filters out pollutants from water so you keep the sea clean while you swim. The material is very hydrophobic but will bond to other compounds upon contact and it keeps pollutants in place until you do your “laundry.”
Researchers at the University of California River are part of a team that won an international design competition for creating a swimsuit that cleans water as people swim.
It uses an absorbent 3D-printed elastoplastic skeleton that can rid shorelines of pollutants. Spongy carbon fills in the spaces and acts as the filter. The carbon is very porous with microscopic holes in different sizes, perfect for any size of gunk from the seas. This also means that even for the small volume of sponge used in a bikini top, there is a lot of surface area to suck up pollutants.
The Sponge material can absorb up to 25 times its own weight and it doesn’t release the absorbed materials unless it is heated at a temperature exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius. The contaminants will be trapped in the inner pores of the sponge material, so they don’t touch the skin. After being used a number of times, the sponge pad can be replaced with a new pad and the old one can be recycled.
[from Elegancy101]
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