Fabrication of sugarcane bagasse ester-based porous nanofiber membrane by electrospinning for efficient oil-water separation

With the increasing demand for oily sewage treatment, the lignocellulosic biomass-based membrane has aroused great attention due to its renewability and efficient performance for oil-water separation. However, the application of lignocellulosic biomass generally needs complex fractionation to use one of the components for materials preparation, causing extra energy cost and potential environmental pollution. In this study, sugarcane bagasse (SCB) was directly esterified with different functional groups to improve its solubility and hydrophobicity to enable electrospun into nanofiber membrane for oil-water separation. The obtained nanofiber exhibited high porosity, leading to an excellent oil adsorption capacity of 1455 wt% for pump oil. Notably, the SCB benzyl ester-based membrane shows outstanding oil/water mixture separation performance (separation efficiency of 99.54% and purity of 99.9% for n-hexane/water mixture) and oil/water emulsion separation performance (rejection of 99.6% with the separation flux of 419.8 L·m−2 h−1 with the force of gravity). Furthermore, the decent structural stability of SCB based membrane allowed recycling for multiple time, therefore endow the SCB ester-based nanofiber with great potential on the commercial oil-water separation.