Marine oil spills seriously endanger sea ecosystems and coastal environments, resulting in a loss of energy resources. Environmental and economic demands emphasize the need for new methods of effectively separating oil-water mixtures, while collecting oil content at the same time. A new surface-tension-driven, gravity-assisted, one-step, oil-water separation method is presented for sustained filtration and collection of oil from a floating spill. A benchtop prototype oil collection device uses selective-wettability (superhydrophobic and superoleophilic) stainless steel mesh that attracts the floating oil, simultaneously separating it from water and collecting it in a container, requiring no preseparation pumping or pouring. The collection efficiencies for oils with wide ranging kinematic viscosities (0.32-70.4 cSt at 40 °C) are above 94%, including motor oil and heavy mineral oil. The prototype device showed high stability and functionality over repeated use, and can be easily scaled for efficient cleanup of large oil spills on seawater. In addition, a brief consolidation of separation requirements for oil-water mixtures of various oil densities is presented to demonstrate the versatility of the material system developed herein.
Rapid advances in modern electronics place ever-accelerating demands on innovation towards more robust and versatile functional components. In the flexible electronics domain, novel material solutions often involve creative uses of common materials to reduce cost, while maintaining uncompromised performance. Here we combine a commercially available paraffin wax–polyolefin thermoplastic blend (elastomer matrix binder) with bulk-produced carbon nanofibres (charge percolation network for electron transport, and for imparting nanoscale roughness) to fabricate adherent thin-film composite electrodes. The simple wet-based process produces composite films capable of sustained ultra-high strain (500%) with resilient electrical performance (resistances of the order of 101–102 Ω sq−1). The composites are also designed to be superhydrophobic for long-term corrosion protection, even maintaining extreme liquid repellency at severe strain. Comprised of inexpensive common materials applied in a single step, the present scalable approach eliminates manufacturing obstacles for commercially viable wearable electronics, flexible power storage devices and corrosion-resistant circuits.
Many important applications in fluid management could benefit from unidirectional transport through porous media via a simple, large-area, low-cost coating treatment; in essence, a fluid diode demonstrated herein for water using common cellulosic paper substrates. In electronics, the diode is an electrical component with asymmetric current transfer characteristics. A light (<2 g/m(2)) superhydrophobic conformal coating applied onto one side of a porous substrate is shown to create a liquid transport function analogous to the electronic diode, facilitating fluid movement in one direction under negligible penetration pressures, but opposing it in reverse up to greater pressures. The phenomenon is driven by capillary action and can be observed using any similarly-thin fluid barrier applied on only one side (i.e., wettability contrast) of an absorbent porous matrix. Diodic action and liquid transport rates are shown to be highly tunable, determined by fiber diameter and spacing, in combination with coating deposition amount. As an example, the device is used to separate an oil/water mixture, relying upon the surface tension differences of the mixture constituents, and may be implemented in multicomponent fluid filtration/separation technologies.
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