Selective Cooperation with Liquids for Environmentally Friendly and Comprehensive Oil-Water Separation

A hydrophobic 3 D material having smart relationship with oil under water (having both water affinity and water repellency in absence and presence of oil), is developed here using a scalable and facile 1,4-conjugate addition reaction between acrylate and amine groups at ambient conditions without using any catalyst. The material that was soaked with water in air is capable of absorbing both heavy and light oils with an efficiency above 1000 wt %, and the impregnated metastable aqueous phase was spontaneously and selectively ejected out from the material. This unprecedented super-oil-absorbance property remained intact in diverse scenarios, including extremes of temperature (100 and 10 °C), pressure (184.7 mbar), and prolonged (7 days) exposures to extremes of pH (1 and 12), surfactants-contaminated (dodecyltrimethylammonium bromide/sodium dodecyl sulfate, DTAB/SDS, 1 mm) water, artificial sea water, etc. Furthermore, this super-oil-absorbent having outstanding durability was exploited also in demonstrations of comprehensive and facile clean-up of oil from various forms of oil-water mixtures (i.e., floating light-oil, sediment heavy-oil, oil-in-water emulsions, etc.) in extremes and complex settings that are relevant to practical scenarios including marine oil spills, following ecofriendly and energy-efficient selective-absorption/active-filtration principles.