A new way to construct multifunctional superhydrophobic coating and applications in anti-corrosion, self-cleaning, membrane distillation and Water/Oil separation

Abstract

Superhydrophobic materials have prospective applications in the field of self-cleaning, anti-corrosion and anti-fouling. However, the methods of preparing superhydrophobic surfaces usually have many disadvantages, and the scope of application is limited. Therefore, it is particularly important to adopt a widely applicable method to construct superhydrophobic surfaces. In this work, a general coating method has been used to fabricate superhydrophobic that polyaniline (PANI), titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO2-NPs) and 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorodecyltrie -thoxysilane (PDTS) has been chosen to modified polyimide nanofibrous membrane (PI NFM) (named as: PI-3). The PI-3 membrane exhibited a superior contact angle of 162˚ and ultralow adhesion of water droplets. Moreover, it not only displayed the properties of self-cleaning and anti-corrosion, but also had the broad application prospects in membrane distillation and oil/water separation. We conducted a series of tests, including contact angle measurement, roughness testing, wettability assessment, and oil-water separation performance evaluation. In the test of direct contact membrane distillation, it showed that the flux was always retained at beyond 10 L m−2 h−1 and the salt rejection was surpassed 99.26 %.