The clean-up of spilled viscous crude oil has increasingly become a global challenge. Since the rather limited sorption speed restricted the use of traditional oil sorbents materials in practical oil-spill remediation, people gradually pay more attention to the nanoporous materials and technology to clean-up viscous crude oil by turning the rheology though Joule-heating. Herein, we report a quite easy synthesis method to prepare light-weight nanoporous carbon sponges by using the cheap environmentally friendly melamine foam, a widely used and mass disposal building material with high porosity of over 99%, as the template and carbon source. SEM images show that the natural 100 um level porous network structure of melamine foam retained after the carbonized carbon sponge material. Nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherms as well as the corresponding pore size distribution results clearly indicating the unique hierarchical mesoporous features of the as-developed carbon sponge, which is good for its contract with the spill oil. XRD and Raman spectra verified the partial graphitization characteristics of the mesoporous carbon sponges, FT-IR and XPS spectra confirmed the presence of N and O containing functional groups. The Joule-heating performance in a simulated oil spill case under sunlight show that the obtained mesoporous carbon sponges superior than supported graphene control (MF-G) on the heating and rheological regulation effect, thus is an excellent candidate for oil spill recovery. The synthetically balanced physicochemical characteristics and additional merits such as low cost, enriched oxygen-containing functional groups, good bulk electrical conductivities and robustness make this carbon sponge material a good platform for the development of various advanced multifunctional materials for oil spill recovery.
Porous nanozinc oxide (ZnO) was successfully fabricated by a facile infiltration and calcination method with the help of a China rose petal template. The as-prepared products were studied by X-ray powder diffraction, field-emission scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). X-ray diffraction results proved that the as-prepared product was the hexagonal phase of ZnO without any impurity. Both SEM and TEM images showed that the biomorphic structures of ZnO were constructed with many regular nanoparticles with diameter of about 20 nm. The as-synthesised porous nanoZnO displayed excellent waste water treatment performance with high removal capacities toward methyl orange. This novel biotemplate process provides an economical and environmentally friendly route to obtain advanced assembling biomorphic nanoarchitectures, and will make it possible for their potential application in the field of catalysis and other.
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