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.

In this work, the effect of plasma on the chemistry and morphology of coatings deposited by Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (AP-PECVD) is investigated. To do so, plasma deposited amorphous titanium dioxide (TiO2) thin films are compared to thin films deposited using Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition (AP-CVD) not involving the use of plasma. We focus here on the effect and the interest of plasma in the AP-PECVD process over AP-CVD for low substrate temperature deposition. The advantages of AP-PECVD over AP-CVD are often suggested in many articles however no direct evidence of the role of the plasma for TiO2 deposition at atmospheric pressure was reported. Hence, herein, the deposition via both methods is directly compared by depositing coatings with and without plasma using the same CVD reactor. Through the control of the plasma parameters, we are able to form low carbon coatings at low temperature with a deposition rate twice faster than AP-CVD, clearly showing the interest of plasma. Plasma enhanced methods are promising for the deposition of coatings at industrial scale over large surface and at high rate.

SrxBa1−xNb2O6 films have been epitaxially grown on MgO substrates by a single-source plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PE-CVD). Exceptionally high quality of the epitaxial films was observed as indicated by high-resolution synchrotron x-ray diffraction imaging. The films exhibit waveguiding behavior with values of refractive index and the linear electro-optic coefficient r51 close to those of bulk crystals.

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