Oil/water separation, especially for those surfactant-stabilized oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions, is required to protect our ecological environment from destruction. Janus membranes with a function of deemulsification appear as a kind of efficient materials for the separation of O/W emulsions because of a precise adjustment of the surface nature for the hydrophilic and hydrophobic layers. However, existing strategies of membrane preparation suffer from complicated multisteps, leading to uncontrolled thickness of the hydrophilic deemulsification layer. Herein, we present a facile and tunable method to prepare a series of Janus membranes consisting of negatively or positively charged carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and hydrophobic microfiltration membranes by vacuum filtration. The thickness of the hydrophilic CNT coating is thus well-controlled by engineering the amount of CNTs deposited on the substrate membrane. The prepared Janus membranes are effective for the separation of both heavy oil and light oil from O/W emulsions through deemulsification owing to the charge-screening effect. It is very interesting that those membranes displaying a combination of water contact angle and underwater oil contact angle both above 90° have a unique oil delivery behavior and thus high separation performance of oil from O/W emulsions. Such Janus membranes can retrieve 89% of oil in 40 min from the 1,2-dichloroethane/water emulsions with the droplet size of 19 μm. This easy-to-prepare and easy-to-tune strategy provides feasibilities for practical applications of Janus membranes to the deemulsification and separation of O/W emulsions.

In this work, the effects of combining a surfactant/alkali on the stability of heavy-oil-in-water emulsions are analyzed by use of bottle testing, spinning-drop interfacial-tension (IFT) meters, microscopes, conductivity meters, zeta-potential analyzer Turbiscan laboratory expert stabilizer, and Anton Paar rheometer. The experimental results showed that the formulated surfactant (BS-12 and OP-10) had an optimal mass ratio (1:2), and the water-separation rates initially decreased sharply as the concentrations of the surfactant increased, before decreasing moderately until reaching a minimum value. The formulated alkali solution exerted a positive synergistic effect in tandem with the surfactant at low alkali concentrations. In this way, an increasing number of petroleum soaps are produced by reactions between the alkali solutions and the active components in heavy crude oil. However, the effect was reversed at high alkali concentrations, where the compression of the alkali on the electric double layer was more significant. Images of the emulsions taken with a microscope showed that the sizes of the oil droplets were the smallest when the alkali concentration was 0.2% and mass ratio of NaOH and TEA (triethanolamine) was 1:1, which indicated that the amount of petroleum soap produced reached the maximum at this point. In addition, TEA, as a type of surface-active molecule, can form cross-multiple adsorption and hydrogen-bonding structure with surfactant and petroleum soap at the water/oil interface. When the oil/water ratio was 7:3, the water-separation rate reached its lowest point 5.33% for 3 hours. In addition, the emulsion stabilized by the surfactant and the compositional alkali possesses salt tolerance and temperature resistance. When the concentration of the bivalent salt (CaCl 2 and MgCl 2 ) increased to 0.01molÁL À1 , the water-separation rate was less than 20%, and when the temperature increased from 30 to 60 C, the growth of back-scattering (BS) value was less than 2%.

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