Fabrication of g-C3N4 nanosheet on stainless steel mesh for effective separation of oil from water

Abstract

Nowadays, most of the industries depend mainly on oil and oil-based processes, which resulted in producing large volumes of oily wastewater. One of the most common methods used for the treatment of oily contaminated water is the filtration method by modified surfaces. In this research g-C3N4 nanostructured material was prepared via thermal condensation method. g-C3N4 were crystallized in tri-s-triazine phases and their mean crystalline sizes of these nanostructures were 12.17 nm. The high-magnification microscopy images show that the morphology of g-C3N4 were nanosheets. A stainless-steel meshes were modified and coated with the prepared g-C3N4 nanostructured materials to be used for the separation of oil and water mixture. Due to the hydrophobic nature of the modified meshes, oil drops spread over the mesh surface and the water drops form spherical shapes. The most efficient coating among all the modified meshes was g-C3N4, which was functionalized using silane moiety. The separation efficiency of this coated mesh reached 74.87% and it resulted to fast separation. This mesh can separate different types of oil from the oil/water mixture such as toluene, mineral oil, 2-ethyl-1-hexanol, and n-pentane with good efficiency. In addition, the modified mesh can be used up to 40 times and still gives good separation efficiency.