Abstract
Oil-water separation is a worldwide challenge because of the increasing production of industrial oily wastewater and frequent oil spills. The growing environmental and economic demands emphasize the need to develop effective solutions to separate oil and water. Recently, oil-water separation methods were developed by tuning the wettability of membranes via surface functionalization. However, the industrialization of such methods remains challenging due to the easy-fouling, high cost and complex fabrication. Herein, a simple and rapid pathway to separate oil from oil-water mixtures is reported using plasma surface functionalization in an open-air environment. The fine tuning and study of the plasma process parameters enables the selective functionalization of each side of the membranes which led respectively to a superhydrophobic-superoleophilic and superhydrophobic-oleophobic sides. The successful separation, without any external force, of a 50 mL oil-water solution in 6 minutes was achieved. This work paves the way for an efficient, low cost and easily upscalable method for oil-water separation due to the high versatility of the atmospheric pressure plasma processes.
Highlights
Oil-water separation is one of the major global challenges because of the increasing industrial oily wastewater production in the petrochemical, textile, and food industries, for example[1,2,3]
The formed coatings and wettability changes from the origin were studied through the plasma discharges diagnostic via Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES), surfaces morphology observation by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), and the surfaces chemistry analysis via X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS)
The reference mesh membrane surface exhibited an intrinsic hydrophobic-oleophilic property according to water contact angle measurements (WCA) and oil contact angle (OCA) measurements using various oils (Fig. 1b)
Summary
Oil-water separation is one of the major global challenges because of the increasing industrial oily wastewater production in the petrochemical, textile, and food industries, for example[1,2,3]. Techniques including gravity separation, filtration, centrifugation, flotation or electrochemical methods are commonly used; in addition to their relatively low efficiency, they are associated with high operational costs and require a long processing time[5,6,7] To overcome such drawbacks, a highly efficient alternative pathway was reported, consisting of the functionalization of the membrane surfaces to provide selective water/oil wettability surface properties[2,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Both the separation capability and mesh membrane reusability were assessed
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