Oil/Water separations

Oil spill has now been a serious environmental issue, threatening the aquatic ecosystems and even human living environment. It is still challenging to develop absorbents for efficient oil/water emulsion separation and clean-up of viscous crude oil. Conventional countermeasures to massive oil spill accidents include degradation with chemical dispersants, in situ burning, and vacuum suction. However, all these methods have been proved to be expensive, relatively inefficient, and even bring about secondary pollution. More importantly, the selective removal of oil from water is highly desired in order to reclaim the precious oil resources. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, wettability materials used in oil/water separation are receiving considerable attention. Due to their opposing affinities towards water and oil, i.e., hydrophobic and oleophilic, or hydrophilic and oleophobic, such materials can be used to remove only one phase from the oil/water mixture, and simultaneously repel the other phase, thus achieving selective oil/water separation.

To address the abovementioned issues, we develop a bulk structures consisting of smart nanomaterials for oil/water separation.