Thermally Induced Silane Dehydrocoupling: Hydrophobic and Oleophilic Filter Paper Preparation for Water Separation and Removal from Organic Solvents.

Rae Hyung Kang,Dokyoung Kim

doi:10.3390/ma14195775

Abstract

Organic solvents with high purity are essential in various fields such as optical, electronic, pharmaceutical, and chemical areas to prevent low-quality products or undesired side-products. Constructing methods to remove impurities such as water residue in organic solvents has been a significant challenge. Within this article, we report for the first time a new method for the preparation of hydrophobic and oleophilic filter paper (named OCFP), based on thermally induced silane dehydrocoupling between cellulose-based filter paper and octadecylsilane. We comprehensively characterized OCFP using various characterization techniques (FTIR, XPS, XRD, and EDS). OCFP showed super-hydrophobic and oleophilic properties as well as remarkable water separation and removal efficiency (>93%) in various organic solvents with sustained reusability. In addition, the analytical results both before and after filtration of an NMR solvent using OCFP indicated that OCFP has an excellent solvent drying efficiency. This work presents a new strategy for the development of super-hydrophobic cellulose-based filter paper, which has great potential for solvent drying and water separation.

Highlights

Organic solvents are widely used in various fields, including optical, electronic, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, and their quality control is directly related to product quality [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
For the first time, we introduced a simple method for the preparation of hydrophobic and oleophilic filter paper based on thermally induced silane dehydrocoupling (Figure 1b)
To confirm that CPF and ODS reacted via thermally induced silane dehydrocoupling, we analyzed the surface functional groups of cellulose-based filter paper (CFP) and oleophilic filter paper (OCFP) (Figure 2a)

Summary

Introduction

Organic solvents are widely used in various fields, including optical, electronic, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, and their quality control is directly related to product quality [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Many factors may reduce the purity of organic solvents, and water is considered the most noticeable impurity [13,14,15]. Water residues in organic solvents can lower the quality of the product or generate undesired side-products that could be harmful to organisms [16,17]. Have been widely used in chemical reactions within industry and research institutes, but they are miscible and absorb moisture from the air, which induces undesired reactions in products. Solvent-drying is a key step in solvents for organic-, inorganic-, and nano-based reactions [18,19,20,21].

Methods

Results

Conclusion