Biodegradable, superhydrophobic walnut wood membrane for the separation of oil/water mixtures

Abstract

The preparation of environmentally friendly oil/water separation materials remains a great challenge. Freeze-drying of wood after lignin removal yields wood aerogels, which can be used as substrates to prepare fluorine-free environmentally friendly superhydrophobic materials, However, they are more suitable for absorption rather than filtration applications due to their poor strength. A study using cross-sections of pristine wood chips as substrates retains the original strength of wood, but the use of the cross-sectional of wood pieces limits their thickness, strength, and size. In this paper, a degradable fluorine-free superhydrophobic film (max. water contact angle of approximately 164.2°) with self-cleaning and abrasion resistance characteristics was prepared by a one-step method using pristine and activated walnut longitudinal section films as the substrate, with tetraethyl orthosilicate as a precursor and dodecyltriethoxysilane as a modifier. The tensile strength results show that superhydrophobic films with pristine or activated wood substrates maintained the strength of pristine wood and were 2.2 times stronger than the wood aerogel substrate. In addition, after cross-laminating the two samples, the films had the ability to separate oil and water by continuous filtration with high efficiency (98.5%) and flux (approximately 1.3 × 10³ L∙m^‒2∙h^‒1). The method has potential for the large-scale fabrication of degradable superhydrophobic filtration separation membranes.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

wood nanotechnology / superhydrophobic / biodegradable / surface modification / oil/water separation

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51776070) and the State Grid Science and Technology Program (Grant No. SGGNSW00YWJS2100024).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11705-022-2157-z and is accessible for authorized users.

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