A superhydrophobic 3D porous material for oil spill cleanup

Abstract

Oil spills are a serious threat to environment and marine ecosystems; hence, it is urgent to identify an economic and efficient countermeasure to deal with them.

Advanced Sorbents for Oil‐Spill Cleanup: Recent Advances and Future Perspectives

“…In the dip‐coating processes, precursor solutions are usually prepared by dissolving low‐surface‐energy organic molecules or polymers into suitable solvents. Based on these methods, a series of polymer/solvent and organic molecule/solvent precursor systems has been developed, such as polystyrene/toluene, methyltrichlorosilane/hexane,[110b] low‐density polyethylene (LDPE)/xylene,[16b] polypropylene/xylene PDMS/ n ‐hexane, poly(vinylidenefluoride‐hexafluoro propylene) (PVDF‐HFP)/acetone,[110a] fluorinated‐polyacrylate/ethanol and Desmopan 9370 polyurethane/tetrahydrofuran,[98a] fluoroalkylsilane/ethanol,[15c] 1H,1H,2H,2H‐perfluorodecyltriethoxysilane/ethanol,[111a] n ‐octadecyl thiol/ethanol, and so on. By dip coating these precursor solutions onto substrates, followed by a dry process, various oil sorbents have been fabricated.…”

“…In the future, oil‐collecting ships could “fish” the floating oil by pulling a large floatable oil‐collection net made of pipes, monolithic oil sorbents, and pumps. This in situ pumping method is a general strategy that can be extended to various monolithic oil sorbents, such as hydrophobic‐coating‐modified polyurethane sponges, graphene–carbon‐nanotube aerogels,[66f] and hydrophobic fabrics, In addition, Si et al[17a] demonstrated that this kind of oil‐collecting device could also collect pure oil from oil/water emulsions continuously, thus implying their potential usefulness for treating emulsified oil/water mixtures.…”

A facile one-step spray-coating process for the fabrication of a superhydrophobic attapulgite coated mesh for use in oil/water separation

“…[2][3][4] Recently, surfaces with superhydrophobic and superoleophilic properties have attracted extensive interest in the field of oil water separation because of their capacity to absorb only oil while repelling water completely, exhibiting high oil/water separation efficiency and selectivity. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Inspired by the superhydrophobic surface of lotus leaf, a variety of routes have been developed to fabricate superhydrophobic materials for separation of water and oil, including chemical etching, electrospinning techniques, sol-gel, hydrothermal methods and self-assembly processes, etc. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] However, most of the methods used for preparation of such surfaces always involves in two steps processes: creating a hierarchical roughness surface and then chemically modifying the surface with low surface energy materials, and only a few works have been reported for the 3 fabrication of these surfaces in one single step.…”

Efficient extraction and detection of aromatic toxicants from crude oil and tar balls using multiple cyclodextrin derivatives

“…[13][14][15] We have developed a new approach for the cleanup of oil spills in marine environments that focuses on the removal of aromatic toxicants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). 16 The removal of PAHs is particularly important because many of these compounds are known carcinogens or pro-carcinogens, 17 including the Class I carcinogen benzo[a]pyrene (Chart 1, compound 3).…”