Facile Construction of Robust and Powerful Biochar-Decorated Porous Foams with Super-Wettability for Automatic and Continuous Oil Spill Remediation

Carbon-based porous materials have been demonstrated to be promising absorbents for oil spill remediation. However, most reported materials either suffer from poor performance or complicated fabrication procedures. In addition, to continuously drive the oil absorption and collection, auxiliary equipment (e.g., pump) is always necessary, which further increases the complexity and cost for oil spill clean-up. Herein, we develop a facile and scalable strategy to produce biochar-decorated porous materials with tunable super-wettability for highly efficient oil/water separation via pyrolysis of the melamine foam dip-coated with cellulose. The pyrolyzed cellulose forms a layer of biochar mesh wrapped around the skeleton of carbon foam like a soft armor, which remarkably enhances the mechanical properties and super-wettability of the obtained materials. Consequently, the resultant biochar mesh-reinforced carbon foam exhibits ultrahigh sorption capacity toward various organic/oil liquids (up to 80–170 times of its own weight) and excellent reusability. More importantly, we first demonstrate that the BMCF is able to in situ automatically and continuously clean up and collect oil spill from the water surface very rapidly (as high as 283 000 L m–2 h–1) without using any auxiliary equipment, which is much simpler and more efficient than those in previous reports. The facile synthesis process and astonishing performance may bring carbon-based porous materials a step closer to the real application in low viscosity oil spill remediation.