Preparation of superhydrophobic mesh and application in multi-stage parallel oil/water separation system

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Oil/water separation has become a worldwide problem due to the industrial oil pollution and oil-spill accident. Here, the superhydrophobic stainless steel mesh was coated with hydrophobic fumed silica (TS720) and vinyltrimethoxysilane (VTMO) using dip-coating method. The water contact angle was measured to be 152 ± 0.8° and oil contact angle was 0°, which indicated that the coated mesh exhibits good superhydrophobic and superoleophilic properties. Therefore, the coated mesh could be applied to separate different kind of oil/water mixture and the separation efficiency of gasoline/water mixture was up to 95%. Furthermore, the coated mesh had a high recyclability that could maintain separation efficiency above 92.5% after 50 separation cycles, meanwhile, the VTMO/TS720 coated mesh also could keep good separation property under acid or alkali salt environment, showing good potential for industrialized oil/water separation. In addition, utilizing superhydrophobic mesh materials in multi-stage parallel oil/water separation device for industrialized oil/water separation was proposed in this work.