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water separation
Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Materials Letters journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mlblue
Design and fabrication of a highly efficient, stable and durable new wettability coated stainless steel mesh for oil/water separation Mohammad Reza Ghadimi a, Mohammad Azad b, Setare Amirpoor a, Roozbeh Siavash Moakhar a, Abolghasem Dolati a,⇑ a b
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, P.O. Box 11155-9466, Tehran, Iran Faculty of Chemistry, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, P.O. Box 15875-4416, Tehran, Iran
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 22 July 2019 Received in revised form 29 August 2019 Accepted 3 September 2019 Available online 4 September 2019 Keywords: Superhydrophilic Superoleophobic Micro-nanostructures Oil/water separation Surface
a b s t r a c t The separation of water-oil mixtures has attracted widespread attention because of the increasing amounts of oily wastewater produced from the daily activities of humans and different industrial processes. Therefore, the development of facile and efficient oil-water separation technologies is imperative. In this work, a new highly superhydrophilic-superoleophobic coated stainless steel mesh was fabricated using virtue of the surface modification of poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) through a facile preparation process. The new fabricated superhydrophilic and highly oleophobic coating exhibits good adhesive properties. The oil contact angle (OCA) and water contact angle (WCA) of the modified stainless-steel mesh were 135° and 0°, respectively. The experimental results indicated that the coated stainless-steel mesh exhibited outstanding separation efficiency for oil/water mixtures. Ó 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction In recent years, oil-water separation has become a longstanding considerable challenge to efficiently separating oil and water emulsion because of increasing amounts of industrial oily wastewater production in a number of processes such as textile, food industries as well as petrochemicals [1–3]. Numerous physical and chemical techniques have been applied to separate water-oil mixtures such as centrifuges, coagulation-flocculation, sedimentation, electroflotation and photocatalytic treatment [4,5]. However, these conventional methods have their own limitations such as poor separation efficiency, secondary pollution or high-energy consumption, large footprints, and low costeffectivity [6]. Moreover, the oil-water emulsion is very stable due to droplet sizes of under 20 lm, which will not be separated by solely gravity driven processes. Therefore, seeking efficient approaches to exploit a new separation technology in a facile and selective way for oil-water separation has attracted growing research interest [7]. In this context, many studies have recently focused on the separation of water-oil emulations using design of advanced materials with desirable wettability to separate oil/water mixtures [8,9]. The membrane technology that has emerged as an efficient technique for separation and purification is attracting big ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Dolati). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2019.126627 0167-577X/Ó 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
attention due to its high efficiency, ease for continuous operation, low-cost energy, and low footprint [10,11]. Membrane separation technology has been successfully used for many decades in various industries such as desalination, wastewater treatment, food processing, and pharmaceuticals [12,13]. There are two types of wetting membranes in which the surface properties allow oil/water separation: (1) superhydrophobic-super oleophilic filter membranes (oil-removing type of films) to remove oils from water [14–16]. As water usually has a higher density compared to oils, it tends to form a barrier layer to prevent oil permeation. Also, the oil-removing membranes are easily fouled or even blocked up by oil adhesion, which results in an apparent decline of separation efficiency as well as secondary pollution during the separation process, which limits these systems for their further applications [17]. (2) An alternative approach to overcoming this limitation is membranes with superhydrophilicity-superoleo phobicity (oil-blocking types of materials), which have attracted great attention for oil/water separation [18,19]. Superhydrophilic-superoleophobic membranes show superior properties when compared to superhydrophobic-superoleophilic materials for several reasons, such as easy recycling, reduction of the possibility of membrane clogging by the viscous oil, and prevention of the formation of the water barrier between the membranes and the oil phase [20,21]. The preparations of the superhydrophilic and superoleophobic separation membranes are based on the hydrophilic surface modification of base materials
2
M.R. Ghadimi et al. / Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
Fig. 1. The typical synthetic steps for the preparation of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanocomposite coated stainless-steel mesh surface.
Fig. 2. Morphology and surface of the stainless-steel mesh after the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)-SiO2 nanoparticles assembly of coating at (a) 100x, (b) 15 kx, (c) 135 kx, and chemical compositions of the coatings: (d) EDS spectra and element mapping of Br (e), Si (f), F (g) of the coated stainless-steel mesh after modification with Poly (BzVimBrVim)-SiO2 nanoparticles, respectively.
M.R. Ghadimi et al. / Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
along with the generation of surface micro-nano structures, which contributes to surface roughness and amplifies surface wetting behaviors. Up to now, many materials have been used for the fabrication of oil-blocking types of membranes with various morphologies including nanoparticles, nanoneedles and hierarchical porous structures like chitosan, hydrogel, graphene oxide, zeolite, silica gel, and so on [22–26]. Despite these efforts, it is of extreme urgency to develop stable superhydrophilicity and superoleophobicity membranes with good wettability and anticrude oil fouling properties for the separation of oil-water mixtures. Herein, a superhydrophilic-superoleophobic membrane is designed and fabricated by coated poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)@SiO2 NPs onto a stainless-steel mesh through surface modification for highly stable oil/water separation. 2. Experimental details All chemicals were purchased from commercial sources (SigmaAldrich and Merck) and used without further purification. The synthesis of imidazolium salts was performed similar to the reported procedures [27]. The targeted poly (BzVimBr-Vim) was prepared through the free radical polymerization of vinylimidazole (VIm) and 3-benzyl-1-vinyl-1H-imidazol-3-ium bromide salt (BzVimBr). Fig. 1 shows the typical synthetic steps for the preparation of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanocomposite coated stainless-steel mesh surface (200 mm).
3
To determine the optimum conditions, the amount of SiO2 NPs, Poly (BzVimBr-Vim), and PFOA were studied (Table S1). The details of the fabrication process of the superhydrophilic-superoleophobic coated stainless steel mesh is recorded in the supporting information. 3. Results and discussion The structure of the rough surface was observed using a fieldemission scanning electron microscope (FESEM, MIRA//TESCAN) after coating the stainless-steel mesh. A thin layer of gold was coated on the samples by ion sputtering (EM-Tech, K450X) prior to FESEM observations. The chemical composition data of the films on the stainless-steel mesh was characterized by EDS. Fig. 2a–c exhibit the FESEM images of the stainless-steel mesh after the assembly of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)-SiO2 nanoparticles coating. As it can be observed, the steel wires were completely covered by the coating material. The energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) measurements revealed the presence of silicon, fluorine, carbon, nitrogen and bromide on the surface (Fig. 2d). The EDS elemental mapping results indicate elemental silicon, fluorine and bromide homogeneously distributed over the surface of the wires (Fig. 2e–g). The EDS measurements further confirmed that the top surface of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 coating is rich in fluorine, silicon, bromide and nitrogen, which provides the materials base for good
Fig. 3. The (a) 3D (b) 2D AFM micrographs and (c) roughness line profile of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)-SiO2 nanoparticles assembly of coating.
4
M.R. Ghadimi et al. / Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
hydrophilicity and permeability of the coated mesh for water. According to these analyses the surface of the coated stainlesssteel mesh is composed of almost 60 wt% Poly (BzVimBr-Vim) @PFOA@SiO2 nanoparticles. Typically, there are four primary modes of adsorption associated with organic molecules on surfaces [28]: (a) electrostatic adsorption (physisorption), (b) p-back bonding, chemisorption, (c) hydrogen bonding, (d) and organometallic complex formation. Furthermore, the stability of the adsorbed organic compound films/layer on the metal surface depends on the nature of the functional groups, aromaticity, possible steric factors, and electronic density of donors. Therefore, the poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 NPs may adsorb on the stainless steel surface by electrostatic interaction between the protonated form of poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 NPs, already adsorbed counter bromide ions (physisorption), donor-acceptor interaction between unshared electron pairs of heteroatoms (O and N) and empty dorbitals of Fe surface atoms (chemisorption), donor-acceptor interaction between the p-electron of aromatics ring (benzene and imidazole), and multiple bonds and vacant d-orbitals of Fe surface atoms (chemisorption). The film consists of nanoscale aggregates created by nearly spherical nanoparticles with an average diameter of 30 nm. FT-IR spectrum for the pristine and modified Poly (BzVimBr-Vim) @PFOA@SiO2 is presented in Fig. S1. Also, the AFM micrographs in Fig. 3 revealed a micro/nano scale roughness of firmly packed nanoparticles with an average surface roughness (Ra) of 45 nm, which results in improved oleophobicity behavior of the coating according to the Cassie – Baxter state [28]. For details on durability screening (Fig. S2) and long-term stability (Fig. S3) of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanocomposite see the Supplementary information. Ultimately the oil/ water separation yields have a superb efficiency of over 96% (Fig. S4 and Movie S1) mainly due to the: (i) finer size of mesh and formation of silica which causes the higher roughness and eventually better oleophobicity; (ii) reduction of surface energy of the synthesized poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@SiO2 nanocomposite by PFOA, (iii) formation of hierarchical micro-nanometer scale roughness structures on the coating surface; and (iv) stable adhesion of SiO2 NPs into poly (BzVimBr-Vim) after hydrogen-bond with imidazole. Hence, the as-prepared coated mesh shows great water affinity (superhydrophilicity) and low adhesion properties for oil (superoleophobicity), which could separate oil/water mixtures with high efficiency. Thus-coated mesh could be successfully used in industrial applications requiring low surface energy and high mechanical performance. 4. Conclusion In this study, a superhydrophilic and superoleophobic poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 NPs coated mesh was fabricated. The coated mesh exhibited superhydrophilicity-superoleophobicity
and ultralow oil-adhesion, and was applied to separate oil-water mixtures. The mesh can selectively separate water from oil-water mixtures with a high separation efficiency of up to 96% and could be recycled without showing significant loss in separation efficiency. This study opens up a good future towards the development of advanced oil-water separation materials for practical commercial applications. Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2019.126627. References [1] M.A. Shannon, P.W. Bohn, M. Elimelech, J.G. Georgiadis, B.J. Marinas, A.M. Mayes, Nature 452 (2008) 301–310. [2] I.B. Ivshina, M.S. Kuyukina, A.V. Krivoruchko, A.A. Elkin, S.O. Makarov, C.J. Cunningham, T.A. Peshkur, R.M. Atlas, J.C. Philp, Environ. Sci. Process 17 (2015) 1201. [3] S.B. Joye, Science 349 (2015) 592. [4] M. Cheryan, N. Rajagopalan, J. Membr. Sci. 151 (1998) 13. [5] K.S. Ashaghi, M. Ebrahimi, P. Czermak, Open Environ. Sci. 1 (2007) 1. [6] S. Munirasu, M.A. Haija, F. Banat, Process Saf. Environ. Prot. 100 (2016) 183. [7] C. Charcosset, I. Limayem, H. Fessi, J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol. 79 (2004) 209. [8] B. Su, Y. Tian, L. Jiang, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 138 (2016) 1727. [9] H. Zhu, Z. Guo, J. Bionic Eng. 13 (2016) 1. [10] M.G. Buonomenna, RSC Adv. 3 (2013) 5694. [11] A. Lee, J.W. Elam, S.B. Darling, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol. 2 (2016) 17. [12] A.G. Fane, R. Wang, M.X. Hu, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 54 (2015) 3368. [13] M.M. Pendergast, E.M.V. Hoek, Energy Environ. Sci. 4 (2011) 1946. [14] L. Feng, Z. Zhang, Z. Mai, Y. Ma, B. Liu, L. Jiang, D. Zhu, Angew. Chem. 116 (2004) 2046. [15] X. Gao, L. Jiang, Nature. 432 (2004) 36. [16] X.Q. Feng, X. Gao, Z. Wu, L. Jiang, Q.S. Zheng, Langmuir. 23 (2007) 4892. [17] L.P. Xu, J. Peng, Y. Liu, Y. Wen, X. Zhang, L. Jiang, S. Wang, ACS Nano 7 (2013) 5077. [18] Z. Xue, S. Wang, L. Lin, L. Chen, M. Liu, L. Feng, L. Jiang, Adv. Mater. 23 (2011) 4270. [19] J. Zhang, Q. Xue, X. Pan, Y. Jin, W. Lu, D. Ding, Q. Guo, Chem. Eng. J. 307 (2017) 643. [20] Z.-Y. Xi, Y.-Y. Xu, L.-P. Zhu, Y. Wang, B.-K. Zhu, J. Membr. Sci. 327 (2009) 244. [21] E. Yousefi, M.R. Ghadimi, S. Amirpoor, A. Dolati, Appl. Surf. Sci. 454 (2018) 201. [22] J. Ge, J. Zhang, F. Wang, Z. Li, J. Yu, B. Ding, J. Mater. Chem. A 5 (2017) 497. [23] Z. Xiong, H. Lin, Y. Zhong, T.T. Li, Y. Qin, F. Liu, J. Mater. Chem. A (2017) 6538. [24] L.A. Goetz, B. Jalvo, R. Rosal, A.P. Mathew, J. Membr. Sci. 510 (2016) 238. [25] C. Cheng, S. Sun, C. Zhao, J. Mater. Chem. B 2 (2014) 7649. [26] M.A. Gondal, M.S. Sadullah, T.F. Qahtan, M.A. Dastageer, U. Baig, G.H. McKinley, Nat. Sci. Rep. 7 (2017) 1686. [27] M. Azad, S. Rostamizadeh, H. Estiri, Fatemeh Noori. Appl Organomet Chem. 33 (2019) e4952. [28] E.A. Melo-Espinosa, Y. Sanchez-Borroto, M. Errasti, R. Piloto-Rodriguez, R. Sierens, J. Roger-Riba, A. Christopher-Hansen, Energy Procedia. 57 (2014) 886.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Materials Letters journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mlblue
Design and fabrication of a highly efficient, stable and durable new wettability coated stainless steel mesh for oil/water separation Mohammad Reza Ghadimi a, Mohammad Azad b, Setare Amirpoor a, Roozbeh Siavash Moakhar a, Abolghasem Dolati a,⇑ a b
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, P.O. Box 11155-9466, Tehran, Iran Faculty of Chemistry, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, P.O. Box 15875-4416, Tehran, Iran
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 22 July 2019 Received in revised form 29 August 2019 Accepted 3 September 2019 Available online 4 September 2019 Keywords: Superhydrophilic Superoleophobic Micro-nanostructures Oil/water separation Surface
a b s t r a c t The separation of water-oil mixtures has attracted widespread attention because of the increasing amounts of oily wastewater produced from the daily activities of humans and different industrial processes. Therefore, the development of facile and efficient oil-water separation technologies is imperative. In this work, a new highly superhydrophilic-superoleophobic coated stainless steel mesh was fabricated using virtue of the surface modification of poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) through a facile preparation process. The new fabricated superhydrophilic and highly oleophobic coating exhibits good adhesive properties. The oil contact angle (OCA) and water contact angle (WCA) of the modified stainless-steel mesh were 135° and 0°, respectively. The experimental results indicated that the coated stainless-steel mesh exhibited outstanding separation efficiency for oil/water mixtures. Ó 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction In recent years, oil-water separation has become a longstanding considerable challenge to efficiently separating oil and water emulsion because of increasing amounts of industrial oily wastewater production in a number of processes such as textile, food industries as well as petrochemicals [1–3]. Numerous physical and chemical techniques have been applied to separate water-oil mixtures such as centrifuges, coagulation-flocculation, sedimentation, electroflotation and photocatalytic treatment [4,5]. However, these conventional methods have their own limitations such as poor separation efficiency, secondary pollution or high-energy consumption, large footprints, and low costeffectivity [6]. Moreover, the oil-water emulsion is very stable due to droplet sizes of under 20 lm, which will not be separated by solely gravity driven processes. Therefore, seeking efficient approaches to exploit a new separation technology in a facile and selective way for oil-water separation has attracted growing research interest [7]. In this context, many studies have recently focused on the separation of water-oil emulations using design of advanced materials with desirable wettability to separate oil/water mixtures [8,9]. The membrane technology that has emerged as an efficient technique for separation and purification is attracting big ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Dolati). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2019.126627 0167-577X/Ó 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
attention due to its high efficiency, ease for continuous operation, low-cost energy, and low footprint [10,11]. Membrane separation technology has been successfully used for many decades in various industries such as desalination, wastewater treatment, food processing, and pharmaceuticals [12,13]. There are two types of wetting membranes in which the surface properties allow oil/water separation: (1) superhydrophobic-super oleophilic filter membranes (oil-removing type of films) to remove oils from water [14–16]. As water usually has a higher density compared to oils, it tends to form a barrier layer to prevent oil permeation. Also, the oil-removing membranes are easily fouled or even blocked up by oil adhesion, which results in an apparent decline of separation efficiency as well as secondary pollution during the separation process, which limits these systems for their further applications [17]. (2) An alternative approach to overcoming this limitation is membranes with superhydrophilicity-superoleo phobicity (oil-blocking types of materials), which have attracted great attention for oil/water separation [18,19]. Superhydrophilic-superoleophobic membranes show superior properties when compared to superhydrophobic-superoleophilic materials for several reasons, such as easy recycling, reduction of the possibility of membrane clogging by the viscous oil, and prevention of the formation of the water barrier between the membranes and the oil phase [20,21]. The preparations of the superhydrophilic and superoleophobic separation membranes are based on the hydrophilic surface modification of base materials
2
M.R. Ghadimi et al. / Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
Fig. 1. The typical synthetic steps for the preparation of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanocomposite coated stainless-steel mesh surface.
Fig. 2. Morphology and surface of the stainless-steel mesh after the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)-SiO2 nanoparticles assembly of coating at (a) 100x, (b) 15 kx, (c) 135 kx, and chemical compositions of the coatings: (d) EDS spectra and element mapping of Br (e), Si (f), F (g) of the coated stainless-steel mesh after modification with Poly (BzVimBrVim)-SiO2 nanoparticles, respectively.
M.R. Ghadimi et al. / Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
along with the generation of surface micro-nano structures, which contributes to surface roughness and amplifies surface wetting behaviors. Up to now, many materials have been used for the fabrication of oil-blocking types of membranes with various morphologies including nanoparticles, nanoneedles and hierarchical porous structures like chitosan, hydrogel, graphene oxide, zeolite, silica gel, and so on [22–26]. Despite these efforts, it is of extreme urgency to develop stable superhydrophilicity and superoleophobicity membranes with good wettability and anticrude oil fouling properties for the separation of oil-water mixtures. Herein, a superhydrophilic-superoleophobic membrane is designed and fabricated by coated poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)@SiO2 NPs onto a stainless-steel mesh through surface modification for highly stable oil/water separation. 2. Experimental details All chemicals were purchased from commercial sources (SigmaAldrich and Merck) and used without further purification. The synthesis of imidazolium salts was performed similar to the reported procedures [27]. The targeted poly (BzVimBr-Vim) was prepared through the free radical polymerization of vinylimidazole (VIm) and 3-benzyl-1-vinyl-1H-imidazol-3-ium bromide salt (BzVimBr). Fig. 1 shows the typical synthetic steps for the preparation of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanocomposite coated stainless-steel mesh surface (200 mm).
3
To determine the optimum conditions, the amount of SiO2 NPs, Poly (BzVimBr-Vim), and PFOA were studied (Table S1). The details of the fabrication process of the superhydrophilic-superoleophobic coated stainless steel mesh is recorded in the supporting information. 3. Results and discussion The structure of the rough surface was observed using a fieldemission scanning electron microscope (FESEM, MIRA//TESCAN) after coating the stainless-steel mesh. A thin layer of gold was coated on the samples by ion sputtering (EM-Tech, K450X) prior to FESEM observations. The chemical composition data of the films on the stainless-steel mesh was characterized by EDS. Fig. 2a–c exhibit the FESEM images of the stainless-steel mesh after the assembly of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)-SiO2 nanoparticles coating. As it can be observed, the steel wires were completely covered by the coating material. The energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) measurements revealed the presence of silicon, fluorine, carbon, nitrogen and bromide on the surface (Fig. 2d). The EDS elemental mapping results indicate elemental silicon, fluorine and bromide homogeneously distributed over the surface of the wires (Fig. 2e–g). The EDS measurements further confirmed that the top surface of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 coating is rich in fluorine, silicon, bromide and nitrogen, which provides the materials base for good
Fig. 3. The (a) 3D (b) 2D AFM micrographs and (c) roughness line profile of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)-SiO2 nanoparticles assembly of coating.
4
M.R. Ghadimi et al. / Materials Letters 256 (2019) 126627
hydrophilicity and permeability of the coated mesh for water. According to these analyses the surface of the coated stainlesssteel mesh is composed of almost 60 wt% Poly (BzVimBr-Vim) @PFOA@SiO2 nanoparticles. Typically, there are four primary modes of adsorption associated with organic molecules on surfaces [28]: (a) electrostatic adsorption (physisorption), (b) p-back bonding, chemisorption, (c) hydrogen bonding, (d) and organometallic complex formation. Furthermore, the stability of the adsorbed organic compound films/layer on the metal surface depends on the nature of the functional groups, aromaticity, possible steric factors, and electronic density of donors. Therefore, the poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 NPs may adsorb on the stainless steel surface by electrostatic interaction between the protonated form of poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 NPs, already adsorbed counter bromide ions (physisorption), donor-acceptor interaction between unshared electron pairs of heteroatoms (O and N) and empty dorbitals of Fe surface atoms (chemisorption), donor-acceptor interaction between the p-electron of aromatics ring (benzene and imidazole), and multiple bonds and vacant d-orbitals of Fe surface atoms (chemisorption). The film consists of nanoscale aggregates created by nearly spherical nanoparticles with an average diameter of 30 nm. FT-IR spectrum for the pristine and modified Poly (BzVimBr-Vim) @PFOA@SiO2 is presented in Fig. S1. Also, the AFM micrographs in Fig. 3 revealed a micro/nano scale roughness of firmly packed nanoparticles with an average surface roughness (Ra) of 45 nm, which results in improved oleophobicity behavior of the coating according to the Cassie – Baxter state [28]. For details on durability screening (Fig. S2) and long-term stability (Fig. S3) of the Poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 nanocomposite see the Supplementary information. Ultimately the oil/ water separation yields have a superb efficiency of over 96% (Fig. S4 and Movie S1) mainly due to the: (i) finer size of mesh and formation of silica which causes the higher roughness and eventually better oleophobicity; (ii) reduction of surface energy of the synthesized poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@SiO2 nanocomposite by PFOA, (iii) formation of hierarchical micro-nanometer scale roughness structures on the coating surface; and (iv) stable adhesion of SiO2 NPs into poly (BzVimBr-Vim) after hydrogen-bond with imidazole. Hence, the as-prepared coated mesh shows great water affinity (superhydrophilicity) and low adhesion properties for oil (superoleophobicity), which could separate oil/water mixtures with high efficiency. Thus-coated mesh could be successfully used in industrial applications requiring low surface energy and high mechanical performance. 4. Conclusion In this study, a superhydrophilic and superoleophobic poly (BzVimBr-Vim)@PFOA@SiO2 NPs coated mesh was fabricated. The coated mesh exhibited superhydrophilicity-superoleophobicity
and ultralow oil-adhesion, and was applied to separate oil-water mixtures. The mesh can selectively separate water from oil-water mixtures with a high separation efficiency of up to 96% and could be recycled without showing significant loss in separation efficiency. This study opens up a good future towards the development of advanced oil-water separation materials for practical commercial applications. Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2019.126627. References [1] M.A. Shannon, P.W. Bohn, M. Elimelech, J.G. Georgiadis, B.J. Marinas, A.M. Mayes, Nature 452 (2008) 301–310. [2] I.B. Ivshina, M.S. Kuyukina, A.V. Krivoruchko, A.A. Elkin, S.O. Makarov, C.J. Cunningham, T.A. Peshkur, R.M. Atlas, J.C. Philp, Environ. Sci. Process 17 (2015) 1201. [3] S.B. Joye, Science 349 (2015) 592. [4] M. Cheryan, N. Rajagopalan, J. Membr. Sci. 151 (1998) 13. [5] K.S. Ashaghi, M. Ebrahimi, P. Czermak, Open Environ. Sci. 1 (2007) 1. [6] S. Munirasu, M.A. Haija, F. Banat, Process Saf. Environ. Prot. 100 (2016) 183. [7] C. Charcosset, I. Limayem, H. Fessi, J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol. 79 (2004) 209. [8] B. Su, Y. Tian, L. Jiang, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 138 (2016) 1727. [9] H. Zhu, Z. Guo, J. Bionic Eng. 13 (2016) 1. [10] M.G. Buonomenna, RSC Adv. 3 (2013) 5694. [11] A. Lee, J.W. Elam, S.B. Darling, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol. 2 (2016) 17. [12] A.G. Fane, R. Wang, M.X. Hu, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 54 (2015) 3368. [13] M.M. Pendergast, E.M.V. Hoek, Energy Environ. Sci. 4 (2011) 1946. [14] L. Feng, Z. Zhang, Z. Mai, Y. Ma, B. Liu, L. Jiang, D. Zhu, Angew. Chem. 116 (2004) 2046. [15] X. Gao, L. Jiang, Nature. 432 (2004) 36. [16] X.Q. Feng, X. Gao, Z. Wu, L. Jiang, Q.S. Zheng, Langmuir. 23 (2007) 4892. [17] L.P. Xu, J. Peng, Y. Liu, Y. Wen, X. Zhang, L. Jiang, S. Wang, ACS Nano 7 (2013) 5077. [18] Z. Xue, S. Wang, L. Lin, L. Chen, M. Liu, L. Feng, L. Jiang, Adv. Mater. 23 (2011) 4270. [19] J. Zhang, Q. Xue, X. Pan, Y. Jin, W. Lu, D. Ding, Q. Guo, Chem. Eng. J. 307 (2017) 643. [20] Z.-Y. Xi, Y.-Y. Xu, L.-P. Zhu, Y. Wang, B.-K. Zhu, J. Membr. Sci. 327 (2009) 244. [21] E. Yousefi, M.R. Ghadimi, S. Amirpoor, A. Dolati, Appl. Surf. Sci. 454 (2018) 201. [22] J. Ge, J. Zhang, F. Wang, Z. Li, J. Yu, B. Ding, J. Mater. Chem. A 5 (2017) 497. [23] Z. Xiong, H. Lin, Y. Zhong, T.T. Li, Y. Qin, F. Liu, J. Mater. Chem. A (2017) 6538. [24] L.A. Goetz, B. Jalvo, R. Rosal, A.P. Mathew, J. Membr. Sci. 510 (2016) 238. [25] C. Cheng, S. Sun, C. Zhao, J. Mater. Chem. B 2 (2014) 7649. [26] M.A. Gondal, M.S. Sadullah, T.F. Qahtan, M.A. Dastageer, U. Baig, G.H. McKinley, Nat. Sci. Rep. 7 (2017) 1686. [27] M. Azad, S. Rostamizadeh, H. Estiri, Fatemeh Noori. Appl Organomet Chem. 33 (2019) e4952. [28] E.A. Melo-Espinosa, Y. Sanchez-Borroto, M. Errasti, R. Piloto-Rodriguez, R. Sierens, J. Roger-Riba, A. Christopher-Hansen, Energy Procedia. 57 (2014) 886.