Special Wettable Materials Based On Rock Wool And Its Application In Oil-water Separation

The frequent leakage of offshore oil and the emission of industrial organic solvents have a serious impact on the environment and ecosystem.Traditional solutions,such as:chemical dispersion,in situ combustion and biodegradation,although these methods are simple,but they often have low separation efficiency,environmental pollution and other shortcomings.Recently,oil-water separation materials based on special wettability have shown a good application prospect in oil-water separation field.Oil-water separation material is generally divided into two types:filter material and absorbing material.At present,whether it is filter material based on metal mesh,fabric fiber and polymer film or oil absorbing materials based on carbon and sponge,the study of these materials have been made on the good progress,but considering the application of oil-water separation material in the reality,how to find a cheap and environmentally friendly matrix,developing an oil-water separation material through simple modification methods is an urgent problem to be solved.Rock wool is a kind of mineral fiber which is widely used in building heat preservation.Because of its origin from stone,it can be weathered naturally and will not pollute the environment.In addition,it has abundant pores in its interior so that it can be used as the base material for oil absorption.In this paper,we introduce polysiloxane and nano SiO2 into the surface of rock wool to obtain superhydrophobic rock wool oil absorbent material by dip-coating.The water contact angle(WCA)of the modified rock wool is 153°,and it has a good absorption to different kinds of oil and organic solvents.In addition,we connect modified rock wool with vacuum device to absorb oil or solvent on the water surface constantly and effectively,which makes it possible to clean up the oil spill on the sea surface.On the other hand,we use photo-initiating polymerization to introduce hydrophilic polyacrylamide onto the surface of rock wool to obtain superhydrophilic and underwater superoleophobic filter material.The results show that the modified rock wool has good separation effect to different oil-water mixture and separation efficiency up to 97%,and does not require additional force only under the action of gravity,so we believe that this kind of oil-water separation materials based on rock wool are expected to show a good application prospect in the future.