Toil With Oil

Overview

Objectives/Goals I believe that medium textured human hair will adsorb the most oil because it is not too coarse, but not too fine and thin. Methods/Materials First I collected different types of hair. I then put a consistant weight of hair into a piece of mylon and weighed it. Next I put the hairball into a beaker of oil and water and let it sit rot three minutes. When the time was up, I immediatly took the hairball out of the liquid and calculated the percent of oil adsorbed. Materials; Human hair, donkey hair, horse hair, mule hair, cow hair, goat hair, dog hair, 250 ML beaker, vegetable oil, water, scale, nylons, and calculator. Results All of the hair, excluding meduim textured human hair adsorbed 60% or more of the oil. None of the hair adsorbed any measurable water. Donkey hair adsorbed the most oil, adsorbing 96%, and medium human hair the least, adsorbing 47%. Conclusions/Discussion I believe that animal hair adsorbed more oil than human hair because of it's light weight. The lighter it was, the more hair went into a nylon, hence, more surface area, so more oil was adsorbed. As for the results of the human hair, I believe it had to do with texture. I did this project because I am interested in ways to promote a healthy environment.

Competition history

• CSEF 2004 Environmental Engineering · Entry J0811

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Environmental Engineering projects
• CSEF Environmental Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2004 project