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Abstract
The efficient removal of the fine oil droplets from a large amount of water produced by oil and gas production is a challenge faced by industries not only for environmental concerns but also for cost reduction. Although much effort has been made on developing various separation technologies, we still lack an adequate method to achieve desirable results. The nanoengineered advanced materials could play an important role in achieving the needed breakthrough on the effective removal of fine oil droplets from industrial wastewater. Herein, we report an amphiphilic Janus porous nanocomposite, which consists of oleophilic MoS2 nanospheres that are embedded within the hydrophilic three-dimensional (3D) reduced graphene oxide framework. The Janus MoS2/rGO nanocomposite is synthesized via the hydrothermal process. Our experiments confirmed that this Janus nanocomposite demonstrated 98.56% removal of fine oil droplets from water within 3 min, with remarkable regeneration and recycling ability. This excellent performance is attributed primarily to its Janus structure that offers amphiphilic surface property and high surface activity to effectively enhance the adsorption of oil droplets in the oil and water emulsion environment. These findings hold promise for the next-generation Janus nanocomposite-based technology aiming removal of fine oil droplets from oil- and gas-produced water in the energy industry.
Highlights
With the increased energy demand worldwide, the exploration and production of oil and natural gas will be continuously a significant part of energy production
MoS2 nanospheres (12.5 mg) prepared by green synthesis scheme was added to 40 mL of Graphene Oxide (GO) solution (2 mg/mL) prepared by modified Hummers’ method followed by sonication, during which the MoS2 nanospheres and GO sheets were thoroughly mixed with intimate contact of each other
During hydrothermal treatment at 140 °C, the dispersion was subjected to self-assembly driven by π−π stacking and van der Waals forces that broke the surface force balance[45] and resulted in a three-dimensional sponge-like structure of MoS2 nanospheres embedded within the 3D reduced graphene oxide framework, which possessed the amphiphilic Janus property
Summary
With the increased energy demand worldwide, the exploration and production of oil and natural gas will be continuously a significant part of energy production. The conventional water management technologies include membrane filtration, biological aerated filters, hydrocylones, gas floatation, evaporation pond, adsorption, media filtration, ion-exchange technology, chemical oxidation, electrodialysis, freeze−thaw evaporation, polymer extraction, and electrochemistry.[4−12] At present, these technologies offer less ideal efficiencies, relatively high cost, associated fouling problem, and secondary waste generation.[13] Since the oil droplets and hydrocarbons could be in very small size, i.e., less than 20 μm, and highly stable in water with low settling velocities, they have little chance to be settled by gravity, so they are extremely hard to be removed efficiently from water. Membranes of specific wettability, which only allows either oil or water phase to pass,[14−18] and porous sponges, which selectively absorb oil or water into their empty voids,[19−22] are employed for the selective removal of floating and surfactant-stabilized oil droplets with improved separation efficiency. These reported material structures work well for cleaning an oil spill site by floating on the water surface, where oil concentration and volume are both
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