Biomimetic Porous Nanofiber-Based Oil Pump for Spontaneous Oil Directional Transport and Collection.

Abstract

Directional transport and manipulation of liquid substances have drawn wide attention owing to their crucial applications from microfluid to large-area water harvesting. Spontaneous oil directional transport, especially having the prospect of large-scale manufacturing, plays a huge role in marine oil cleanup, but is exposed to the limitations such as low efficiency and transport velocity. Here, we report a biomimetic porous nanofiber-based oil pump from cosolvent electrospinning, endowed with the parenchyma cellular structure of plants. These tightly packed and uniform nanoporous structures of nanofibers are capable of self-pumping oil upward with an ultrahigh pumping rate of 21.12 g g-1 h-1, which has been proposed as an explicit mechanism. Following oil directional transport, it can obtain an efficient oil collection of 127.52 g g-1. We anticipate that our designed oil pump will provide a versatile platform for spontaneous oil directional transport and collection with potential applications in the fields of laboratory-on-a-chip, microreaction devices, chemical engineering, and the petrochemical industry.