Solution Blow Spinning of Polylactic Acid to Prepare Fibrous Oil Adsorbents Through Morphology Optimization with Response Surface Methodology

Abstract

Polylactic acid (PLA) fibrous membrane (PFM) was prepared through solution blow spinning (SBS). The effects of spinning parameters (solution concentration, gas pressure, and spinning distance) on the fiber diameter were studied by response surface methodology. The optimized preparation conditions of PFM were the concentration of PLA solution 8%, gas pressure 0.2 MPa, spinning distance 12 cm. Under the optimized conditions, the average diameter of PLA fibers was 770.45 nm. The oil saturated adsorption capacity of PFM to crude oil, peanut oil and diesel oil was up to 32.28 g/g, 28.80 g/g, and 19.50 g/g, respectively, while that of the commercialized nonwoven polypropylene was only 9.34 g/g, 9.17 g/g, 7.79 g/g, respectively. The adsorption capacity remained at about 50% of the saturated adsorption capacity after 10 cycles of reuse. Similar membrane was also successfully prepared from a waste PLA lid through SBS, which expressed similar oil adsorption behavior with PFM. SBS is potential to deal with the pollutions from waste oil and waste plastic.