| Petroleum and its products play a very important role in our daily life, however, the frequent occurrences of oil spill not only bring huge influences to the natural ecological environment, but also threaten the survival and development of human society. At present, the utilization of oil absorption materials is one of the most efficient methods for oil spill cleanup. There are so many defects of oil sorbents though, such as poor oil selectivity, poor floatability, the secondary pollution and so on. Therefore, the research and development of new oil sorbents are very important. In this paper, we devoted our efforts to the fabrication of nano oil sorbents which is hydrophobic and oleophylic through emulsion polymerization, and the main contents include the following two parts:1. The magnetic polystyrene nano oil sorbents were fabricated through emulsion polymerization with the Fe3O4 nanoparticles and styrene monomer as raw materials, sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate as emulsifier, divinyl-benzene as comonomer, azobisisobutyronitrile as evocating agent. The morphology of the as-prepared oil sorbents were the best when the dosage of sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate and divinyl-benzene were 500mg and 0.5mL, respectively. The fabricated nanoparticles possessed good magnetic responsibility and floating performance, and its water contact angle is 142.1 °, which indicated the excellent hydrophobic property of magnetic polystyrene nanoparticles. These magnetic nanoparticles could effectively absorb diesel oil up to above 2.4 times of the particles’weight, and after 5 cycles of absorption-desorption process, the oil sorption capacity of the sorbent remained the 87.5% of the maximum oil sorption capacity.2. Secondary emulsion polymerization was proved to be the most appropriate route to obtain the PMMA coating based on the magnetic polystyrene nano oil sorbents, and the best dosage of MMA monomers was 1.5mL. After modification, the nanoparticles still remained remarkable magnetic responsibility, floating performance, hydrophobic and oleophylic properties, the oil capacity of the modified nano oil sorbents for diesel oil was calculated to be 3.6g/g, which was 50% higher than the original oil sorbents. The promotion of oil capacity could be assigned to the abundant methyl and esterfunction of PMMA and the raise of Van der Waals’force with the oil molecules. Through secondary emulsion polymerization, the polymer content was calculated to be 55 wt.%. The modified nano oil absorbents exhibited higher oil absorption capacity for salad oil and lubrication oil, which were 4.26 and 9.41g/g, respectively. The higher oil absorption capacity for lubricating oil and salad oil are due to their high viscosity. The modified nano oil absorbents could reach saturation sorption in 30 seconds for diesel oil and salad oil, the saturation sorption for lubricating oil may need over one hour though. The thickness of oil slick, pH of water and the content of NaCl had little impact on the oil absorption capacity of oil sorbents. The mechanism of oil absorption could be the combination of Inclusion type and gel-type. After 10 cycles of absorption-desorption process, the oil sorption capacity decreased to 3.22g/g, which is 89% of the maximum oil sorption capacity, indicating the excellent property of duty-cycle operation. |
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