Recent advances in eco-friendly fabrics with special wettability for oil/water separation

Abstract

Faced with serious damage to aquatic ecosystems and marine life caused by oil spills and oily wastewater discharges, the efficient, environment-friendly and sustainable oil/water separation technology has been an inevitable...

Advances in special wettable materials for adsorption separation of high-viscosity crude oil/water mixtures

“…Recently, the development and utilization of solar energy to solve the problems of environmental pollution and energy crisis has become a significant issue facing the world today. Solar energy is considered as a green and sustainable energy and has been widely applied in photocatalysis, 4,100–102 solar evaporators, 103–108 solar power generation, 109–111 desalination, 112–114 etc. Herein, developing self-heating adsorption separation materials for rapid clean-up of highly viscous oil spills by using clean solar energy is particularly attracting attention.…”

“…1(c), when the roughness of the solid surface increases to a certain degree, a small amount of air is trapped so that the liquid is suspended at the top of the rough structures. Considering the significant influence of surface composition on wettability, Cassie and Baxter introduced different surface fractions to reflect the wettability of rough surfaces: 14,31 cos y CB = f SL cos y SL + f LV cos y LV (4) where y CB denotes the CA in the Cassie-Baxter state; f SL and f LV are the surface fraction of solid-liquid and liquid-vapor phases, respectively (f SL + f LV = 1); y SL and y LV are the intrinsic CAs of the droplet at the solid-liquid interface and liquid-vapor interface, respectively. It should be noted that the Cassie-Baxter's equation can be applied to describe the wettability of porous, rough and air-trapping surfaces.…”

“…Crude oil pollution produced by exploitation, transportation and production has not only caused devastating damage to ecosystems, but also posed a severe threat to the environment and climate, even endangering the survival of human beings. [1][2][3][4] Furthermore, the chemical compositions of crude oil are extremely complex and are majorly divided into saturate, aromatic, resin, and asphaltene according to the polarizability and polarity. 5,6 The physical properties of crude oil (e.g., gravity and viscosity) may transform significantly whenever the components of certain fractions change.…”

Multifunctional materials with controllable superwettability for oil–water separation and removal of pollutants: Design, emerging applications, and challenges

“…As reported in these papers, it is difficult to continuously use oil-absorbing or filtering materials because the oil needs to be squeezed out after adsorption, [218,219] and the pores of filtering materials may be clogged to lose separation capability. [220] The literature related to the reuse of separation materials may focus on the transformation of spent materials into oil-water separation materials. [221,222] At present, the main way for the regeneration and reuse of spent oil-water separation materials is to reconstruct special wettability surface or convert spent materials directly into other materials.…”

High temperature oil–water separation based on superwettable membranes for removing water from condensation reactions

“…On the other hand, numerous oil spill incidents undoubtedly result in the waste of valuable petroleum and clean water resources. [3][4][5][6][7] In order to save the endangered environment, traditional methods of oil-water separation containing in situ burning, 8 mechanical skimmers, 9 gelators, 10,11 biological treatment, 12 membrane separation and so on are oen adopted. [13][14][15] However, these methods are usually accompanied by high energy consumption and low separation efficiency.…”