Smart surfaces with switchable superoleophilicity and superoleophobicity in aqueous media: toward controllable oil/water separation

By Lianbin Zhang, Zhonghai Zhang, Peng Wang. 2012

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Peng Wang and co-workers have devised smart surfaces that have switchable wettability – affinity to oil and water phases. Such materials are useful for applications that require oil/water separation, and might help clean up oil spills in future. The researchers have endowed materials with smart surfaces by decorating them with a polymer made of two flexible blocks with different properties. One block exhibits a high affinity to oil phases and low affinity to aqueous ones, while the other changes its wettability but also its shape through protonation, depending on the acidity of the aqueous phase. At different pHs, therefore, either one block or the other is predominantly exposed to the solution, endowing the surface with different wettability characteristics. These smart surfaces can be coated on commonly used materials such as textiles and sponges, and showed good properties for oil capture and release applications.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98e1d849ccb59df4c13dd2c77ecf8276bdcffd45

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Surfaces, Coatings and Films

1. Nima Rezaei
2. H. Hamedi
3. X. Duan
4. S. Rasouli
5. Sohrab Zendehboudi

Citations in the corpus

• Superhydrophobic and superoleophilic membranes for oil-water separation application: A comprehensive review (2021, background): “Only a few studies in the literature employed superhydrophobic textiles for oil-water separation [295,296].”