Abstract
Recently, polylactide (PLA) aerogel has been considered as an ideal oil-water separation and oil absorption material due to its renewability, biodegradability, considerable mechanical and processing performance. However, the practical application of PLA aerogel still faces some obstacles like inferior heat resistance, poor durability, and unsatisfactory oil-water separation and oil absorption performances. In this work, a promising strategy of constructing different amounts of stereocomplex (SC) crystallites in PLA aerogels via blending poly(L-lactide) (PLLA) with various amounts of poly(D-lactide) (PDLA) is devised to simultaneously overcome these obstacles. The results reveal that the formation of SC crystallites can not only improve the heat resistance and degradation resistance of the SC-type PLA (SC-PLA) aerogels, but also result in many nanopores on the pore walls of SC-PLA aerogels upon freeze-drying. SC-PLA aerogels with such special porous structures exhibit good hydrophobicity, excellent oil-water separation capability, and high absorption capacity for various oils and organic solvents. Specifically, the absorption capacity of SC-PLA50 aerogel can reach 42 times to its own weight, and good cycling stability of SC-PLA50 aerogel is confirmed by the absorption/evaporation cycling experiments. We believe this high-performanced SC-PLA aerogel can be applied in oil spill accidents and industrial wastewater pollution treatments.
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