Superhydrophobic Cellulose Nanofiber-Assembled Aerogels for Highly Efficient Water-in-Oil Emulsions Separation

Abstract

Here, we reported a facile strategy to create superhydrophobic aerogels via freeze-drying of silylated cellulose nanofibers and silica nanoparticles mixed suspensions. The as-prepared aerogels possessed a hierarchical porous structure with high roughness and low surface energy. The hierarchical rough structure and low surface energy endowed the resultant aerogels with superhydrophobicity (water contact angle up to 168.4°). Importantly, the composite aerogels could separate surfactant-stabilized water-in-oil emulsions without external pressure, with high separation efficiency (>99%) and high flux (1910 ± 60 L m–2 h–1). The aerogels were easily recyclable and showed great antifouling performance, which could meet the requirements for long-term use. We also assembled a simple device to collect oil directly from water-in-oil emulsions with the obtained aerogel and a self-priming pump. The fabrication of the composite aerogels in our work provides a versatile way to fabricate cellulose composite materials for water-in-oil emulsions separation.

Complex Aerogels Generated from Nano-Polysaccharides and Its Derivatives for Oil–Water Separation

“…Polysaccharides, as natural macromolecular carbohydrate polymers, are considered as a renewable resource and offer a number of advantages. These advantages include biodegradability, biocompatibility, low processing costs, bioactivity, non-toxicity, and environmental friendliness [14,15,16,17]. More importantly, polysaccharides possess many reactive functional groups such as hydroxyl, amino, and carboxylic acid groups on their backbones that can readily be functionalized to yield a wide range of polysaccharide derivatives [15,17].…”

Superwetting Polymeric Three Dimensional (3D) Porous Materials for Oil/Water Separation: A Review

“…Super-wetting aerogel is reported to treat oily wastewater with the advantages of ultra-light, large specific surface area, large porosity, and relatively large adsorption capacity [127,169,170]. Currently the oil/water separation aerogels included silicon aerogel [171,172,173], carbon aerogel [174,175,176], fiber cellulose aerogel [177,178,179] and composite aerogel [180,181,182] have been reported for oil/water separation because of the unique properties of ultra-light and relatively high specific surface area.…”

Fabrication of highly pressure-sensitive, hydrophobic, and flexible 3D carbon nanofiber networks by electrospinning for human physiological signal monitoring

“…With the development of materials science, three-dimensional (3D) resilient nanostructures have been synthesized and utilized for pressure sensing, such as graphene-polyurethane sponge, 14 carbon black-polyurethane sponge, 6 carbon nanotube-polymer sponge, 17 carbon aerogels, 18 nanofiberassembled cellular aerogels, 19 etc. 3D porous materials are generally attractive due to their high pressure-sensitivity, low density, large surface area, high porosity and other versatile properties.…”