Oil–water separation membranes easily fail to oil foulants with low surface energy and high viscosity, which severely limits these membranes’ applications in treating oily wastewater. Herein, an oil–water separation membrane by bioinspired bubble‐mediated antifouling strategy is fabricated via growing hierarchical cobalt phosphide arrays on stainless steel mesh. The as‐prepared membrane is superhydrophilic/superaerophobic and electrocatalytic for hydrogen evolution under water, which helps to rapidly generate and release abundant microbubbles surrounding the oil‐fouled region on the membrane. These microbubbles can spontaneously coalesce with the oil foulants to increase their buoyancy and warp their interface tension by morphing the oil shape. And this spontaneous coalescence also increases the kinetic energy of oil foulants resulting from the decreased bubbles’ interface energy and potential energy. The synergy of the warped interface tension, increased buoyancy, and kinetic energy drives the efficiently dynamic antifouling of this membrane. This dynamic antifouling even can remove some solid sediment such as oily sand particles that causes more serious fouling of the membrane. Thus, this membrane maintains high flux (>11920 L m−2 h−1 bar−1) in the long‐term separation of oil–water and oil–sand–water emulsions by dynamically recovering the decayed flux on demand, which exhibits great potential in treating industrial oily wastewater.
Metalloenzyme-like metal–nitrogen–carbon
(M–N–C)
single-atom catalysts (SACs) have received increasing attention in
the synthesis of fine chemicals because of the abundant atomic sites
and versatile catalytic properties. However, the organic transformations
with high atom efficiency over SACs in aqueous media were less investigated.
Inspired by the hydrophobic pockets of the metalloenzyme, herein we
introduced a hydrophobic, atomically dispersed Pd catalyst (Pd1–S–C) in the sulfur-doped carbon based on metal–sulfur
coordination chemistry. This hydrophobic Pd-based SAC displayed satisfying
catalytic performance for aqueous-phase semihydrogenation of terminal
alkynes with high chemoselectivity, friendly substrate scope, and
fairly good stability. Molecular dynamics simulations revealed that
the hydrophobicity of the Pd1–S–C catalyst
could contribute to accelerated reaction kinetics by enriching the
organic alkynes around the catalytic sites in aqueous media. Furthermore,
the electron-rich PdS4 single sites were demonstrated to
promote activation of H2 molecules and desorption of CC
intermediates, which outperformed the electron-deficient PdN4 single sites. The current work highlights the potential of enzyme-inspired
hydrophobic SACs in the conversion of organic substrates in aqueous
media.
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