An innovative, fast and facile soft-template approach for the fabrication of porous PDMS for oil-water separation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rapid, simple, and cost-effective method to produce porous PDMS materials capable of efficiently separating oil from water, suitable for emergency spill response.

Contribution

The authors developed an innovative inverse water-in-silicone process that significantly speeds up fabrication and enhances sorption capacity and reusability of porous PDMS.

Findings

Faster fabrication time, completed in minutes.

Higher oil sorption capacity compared to existing materials.

Excellent mechanical strength and reusability.

Abstract

Oil wastewater and spilled oil caused serious environmental pollution and damage to public health in the last years. Therefore, considerable efforts are made to develop sorbent materials able to separate oil from water with high selectivity and sorption capacity. However most of them are low reusable, with low volume absorption capacity and poor mechanical properties. Moreover, the synthesis is time-consuming, complex and expensive limiting its practical application in case of emergency. Here we propose an innovative approach for the fabrication of porous PDMS starting from an inverse water-in-silicone procedure able to selectively collect oil from water in few seconds. The synthesis is dramatically faster than previous approaches, permitting the fabrication of the material in few minutes independently from the dimension of the sponges. The porous material evidenced a higher volume sorption capacity with respect to other materials already proposed for oil sorption from water and excellent mechanical and reusability properties.This innovative fast and simple approach can be successful in case of emergency, as oil spill accidents, permitting in situ fabrication of porous absorbents.