Abstract
Oil-water separation has recently become a worldwide concern because of the increasing oil spill accidents and industrial oily wastewater generation. Herein, a facile method with the combined superhydrophobic coating and adhesive was used to fabricate superhydrophobic TiO2 NPs coated cellulose sponge. The developed materials exhibited excellent superhydrophobicity (WCA = 171°) and superoleophilicity (OCA = 0°), which can separate a variety of oil-water mixtures, including chloroform, toluene, kerosene and other contaminations. A high separation efficiency up to 98.5% for chloroform-water mixture was achieved when used for gravity-driven oil/water separation test. More importantly, the as-prepared samples exhibited excellent chemical stability and mechanical abrasion resistance even towards various corrosive oil/water mixtures (such as strong acid, alkali solution and salt-water environment) or a strong abrasion by aluminium oxide sandpaper of 600 mesh. In addition, the separation efficiency remained above 93% even after 40 scratch cycles, and the materials could be reused with a stable hydrophobicity, indicating a strong potential for industrial application.
Highlights
In the past decades, marine oil spillage and chemical leakage have caused destructive impact on the water environment[1,2,3]
A variety of techniques[17,18,19,20,21] have been developed to produce oil/water separation materials with super-antiwetting surfaces, including bio-based foam membranes[22], filter paper[23], metallic mesh-based materials[24,25,26] and ceramic microfiltration membranes[27], et al these materials exhibited excellent oil-water selectivity and separation efficiency, there remained a number of problems, including the complicated preparing methods, expensive raw materials, poor mechanical stability and chemical stability, which limited their large-scale production
It is evident that this roughness of micro/nano structure is essential for the superhydrophobicity of the resulted materials
Summary
The CA values were measured to identify the hydrophobicity and oleophilicity of superhydrophobic TiO2 NPS coated cellulose sponge The reasons for this phenomenon may be explained as follows: when the superhydrophobic cellulose sponge was pre-wetted by oils or organic solvent, the hierarchical rough structure of the surface was filled with oil, as a result, the sponge surface turned relatively flat.
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