Abstract
There is strong interest in windable and stretchable membranes to meet the technological demands of practical water treatments. Oil/water separating membranes of this type is still significantly underdeveloped. Here, we reported a windable and stretchable membrane with three-dimensional structure for efficient oil/water separation. This membrane is made of ZnO nanorods arrays conformally grown on woven carbon microfibers. This three-dimensional architecture endows the fabricated membrane with highly windable and stretchable properties, at the same time ensures ZnO nanorods fully exposed outwards on the membrane surface. Due to its superior hydrophilicity and oleophobicity of ZnO nanorods, this all-inorganic membrane exhibits outstanding antifouling property, with the foulants on membrane surfaces easily removed by simple physical cleaning without chemicals. The membrane can effectively separate both oil/saline-water mixtures and oil-in-water emulsions, solely driven by gravity, with extremely high permeation flux of 20933.4 L m−2 h−1 and high separation efficiency over 99%.
Highlights
Huge amounts of oily wastewaters are produced daily from the industries of oil production, oil refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical plants, as well as oil spill accidents
The ZnO-nanorod arrays (NRs)/CC membranes were prepared by growing the ZnO-NRs on carbon cloths via hydrothermal reaction at low temperature (Figure S1 shows the SEM image of the carbon cloth membrane with isotropic plain weave structure)
Taking one single fiber at high magnification, the average length of the ZnO-NRs can be estimated by comparing the diameter of the original carbon fiber and the carbon fiber wrapped by the ZnO-NRs (Fig. 1(c))
Summary
Huge amounts of oily wastewaters are produced daily from the industries of oil production, oil refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical plants, as well as oil spill accidents. Among these advanced membranes, superwetting (superhydrophilic and under-water superoleophobic) membranes with nanostructured surface or ultrathin separation layers with nanometer-scale thickness are the most widely studied[6,7] Due to their unique nanostructures, super-wetting membranes are capable of alleviating oil-fouling issues while exhibiting very high permeation flux and excellent separation efficiencies during oil/water separation[8]. None of these membranes reach commercial application level, due to their lack of windable and stretchable properties, which are critical important under hash operation condition for oil/water separation. The prepared membranes showed high flexibility and mechanical strength at different temperatures indicating their great potential for practical application under extreme conditions
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