Green and robust superhydrophilic electrospun stereocomplex polylactide membranes: Multifunctional oil/water separation and self-cleaning

By Zhengmin Zhang, Z. Gan, Rui‐Ying Bao, Kai Ke, Zhengying Liu, Ming‐bo Yang, Wei Yang. 2020

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Superhydrophilic materials have attracted extensive attention as promising candidates for effective oil/water separation and water purification, however, realizing environmentally friendly and multifunctional materials with superhydrophilicity and underwater superoleophobicity is still a great challenge and urgently desired. In this work, we develop a controllable approach to achieve the superhydrophilicity of biodegradable electrospun stereocomplex polylactide (sc-PLA) membranes via the titanium carboxylate coordination bonding of gallic acid (GA) and tetrabutyl titanate (Ti(OBu)4) in aqueous solution, i.e. GA-modified TiO2 (GA-TiO2) coating. The GA-TiO2 coated sc-PLA (GT-sc) membranes show superhydrophilicity and underwater superoleophobicity in various harsh working conditions including corrosive organic solvents, saturated NaCl solution and acid solution at pH = 1, exhibiting effective and efficient separation property for a wide range of oil/water mixtures and oil-in-water emulsions. The GT-sc membranes can remove water-soluble contaminants such as methylene blue driven by gravity, leading to multifunctional water purification. Moreover, the GT-sc membranes possess splendid antifouling and self-cleaning performance resulting from the photocatalytic property of TiO2 under UV irradiation. Thus, this work provides an easily controlled route for fabricating green and durable membranes for multifunctional oil/water separation.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65cdd900a9e8d7ff1b8de043ca11c27cba1fe387