Buoyant and durable oil/water separation mesh for continuous and efficient collection of both oil slick and underwater oil leakage

Abstract

Oil/water separation has aroused widespread concern owning to the severeenvironmental pollution and energy waste result from the frequent oil spill accidents and a great deal of discharged oily sewage. Thus, an efficient oil/water separation method is highly demanded but remains a challenge. To this respect, a specific mesh with super water repellency, good durability, excellent corrosion resistance and buoyant property has been developed in this work via a facile strategy. By virtue of the above superior properties, the resultant superhydrophobic mesh exhibits ultrahigh permeation flux (>22000 L·m−2·h−1) and high separation efficiency (>98.5%) for gravity-induced oil-water separation. Moreover, the resultant mesh can be designed as an oil-collecting device to continuously separate both oil slick and underwater oil leakage from bulk water under the driving of negative pressure, showing a prominent collection capability. It’s worth noting that the effective continuous collection of flowing oils underwater has been rarely reported in the emerging works. Moreover, the obtained mesh also possesses excellent load carrying capacity by buoyancy testing. With the advantages of the attractive property, the as-prepared superwetting mesh will hold great potential in developing of aquatic devices that can move freely on water with great water repellency, which is helpful for large-scale oil spill cleanup.