Sustainable, Flexible, and Superhydrophobic Functionalized Cellulose Aerogel for Selective and Versatile Oil/Water Separation

By Zhangdi Li, Li Zhong, Tao Zhang, F. Qiu, Xuejie Yue, Dongya Yang. ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 2019

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aerogels, as ultralight three-dimensional (3D) highly porous materials, show great superiority in oil and organic pollutant cleanup. Notably, biomass aerogels have also attracted wide interest due to the advantages of huge reserves, low cost, renewability, biodegradation, and nontoxicity to the environment. Herein, a sustainable, flexible, and superhydrophobic functionalized cellulose aerogel, copper nanoparticles-coated cellulose aerogel (Cu/CEA), is reported. The hydrophobic Cu/CEA was simply fabricated by one-step depositing Cu nanoparticles coating on the cellulose fibers extracted from renewable natural sisal in liquid phase followed by freeze–drying. The hydrophobic functionalization approach is facile, cost-effective, and suitable for large-scale production and environmental friendliness, without additional organic hydrophobic modification. The highly porous Cu/CEA as absorbent can selectively and quickly collect oily contaminant, exhibiting high oil absorption capacity and rate, and good recyclabi...

Subfields: Biomaterials, Spectroscopy, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a18ee35dbb1e5217c0f13302221efa2b843794e