Japanese chemists have devised a gel that swells up to 500 times its size when in contact with solvents, an invention hailed as a breakthrough for absorbing dangerous industrial spills.



The jelly-like substance is a successor to polyelectrolyte gels, which expand when in contact with water and are best known in nappies, also called diapers.

Polyelectrolyte gels, though, are useless in tackling organic, or carbon-based, solvents.

Their structure typically collapses because of the aggregation of charged atoms in such compounds, the only exceptions being "polar" solvents that are particularly water-loving.

A team led by Kazuki Sada of Kyushu University found a way around these by adding tetra-alkylammonium tetraphenylborate, a substance that attracts less-polar solvents.

The gel has been successfully tested on carbon tetrachloride, toluene, tetrahydrofuran and other common industrial solvents. Their work is published online on Sunday by the journal Nature Materials.