Fabrication of durable and sustainable superhydrophobic‐superoleophilic paper for efficient oil/water separation

Traditional superhydrophobic materials for oil/water separation not only depend on non-renewable materials but also lead to secondary environmental pollution after use due to their non-biodegradation and introduction of toxic fluorochemicals. Herein, we reported a facile method to prepare durable and sustainable superhydrophobic-superoleophilic paper, which is combination of layer-by-layer (LBL) assembly of ZnO nanoparticles and carrageenan (CR) together with following polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) modification. The surface chemical composition, zeta potential, surface morphology, surface wettability and strength property of the modified paper were investigated. The PDMS/(ZnO/CR)7 multilayer-modified paper showed superhydrophobic-superoleophilic property and 2.6 % improvement in tensile strength compared with original paper. Meanwhile, this superhydrophobic paper exhibited excellent anti-bacterial adhesion ability and photodynamic bactericidal activity, which were more effective in preventing and eliminating bacterial contamination. Besides, the resultant paper had excellent self-cleaning, anti-fouling and water repellency properties, showed excellent separation performances for stratified oil-water mixture and water-in-oil emulsion as well as good recyclability. The obtained superhydrophobic paper also presented excellent mechanical robustness and environmental stability. We believed that superhydrophobic paper prepared in this study could have promising potential as an environmental-benign and effective oil/water separation material.