The Developed Process Unit Combining With Bioinspired Materials Of Wettability Applys To Oil/water Separation And Fog Harvesting

The Earth,as the blue planet in the vast solar system,is covered in two-thirds by the water.Nevertheless,human beings still face many water resources issues,which are mainly divided into two types.Firstly,with the urbanization and industrialization,water pollution is becoming worse.Secondly,water shortage even results in that people have not access to water to survival in arid regions.Thusly,the sustained efforts of mankind are essential to the water resources protection.Bioinspired materials with wettability have exhibited the wide applications in self-cleaning,anticorrosion,anti-icing,antifogging,oil-water separation,drag reduction and water harvesting,etc,and become a popular topic.Traditional oil/water separation methods always have inherent issues,e.g.,low efficiency,high cost,complicated operation and secondary pollution.In addition,separation of an emulsified oil/water mixture is always difficult and full of challenge.Inspired by the ability of the conical spine on the surface of the Cactaceae family to collect water droplets in the fog,the superhydrophobic N-Dodecyl mercaptan?NDM?/Cu?OH?₂ foam copper catcher?NCFCC?with conical nanowire structures on the surface was prepared in the paper at first;then,the continuous oil/water separator was designed and developed.The separator can continuously and stably separate the surfactant-stabilized toluene-in-water emulsions for 1 h under catcher distance of 0.2 mm and the flux of 5 mL·min^-1 by the cross flow method,and the separation efficiency maintains higher than 99%with an oil content in the liquid after separation lower than 450 ppm.In addition,the flux of the separator is able to be increased with one catcher distance if there is a relatively low separation efficiency request.This work provides a novel method for the continuous separation of surfactant-stabilized oil-in-water emulsions.It is expected that the oil/water separator can be applied to the treatment of complex oily wastewater in industry.The classical mesh design suffers from dual constraints:coarse meshes cannot efficiently capture the micrometric fog droplets suspended in the wind,resulting in the decreace of the fog harvesting rate;whereas the fine meshes become clogged by water droplets,resulting in the decreace of the fog harvesting rate too.Herein,we twined the organic glass frame in various wire materials,a fog harp was prepared.Then,the fog collector was designed and developed.Our research shows that the fog harvesting rate of the fog harp with hydrophobic and dense wire materials.The study preliminarily proves the solution to reducing net-like materials to be clogged by water droplets.It is expected that the method can be applied to fog harvesting in arid regions.