Various
oils discharged from daily life and industrial production, as well as frequent
oil spillages, have led to severe water pollution and ecological problems.
Mussel-inspired polydopamine has been widely applied for fabrication of
superhydrophobic materials for oil/water separation. However, the need of
additional nanoparticles via tedious
steps to construct nanostructures, and the high cost of dopamine itself limit
its practical applications. Moreover, the application modes of superhydrophobic
materials for oil/water separation are monotonous, which will limit the applied
range of the superhydrophobic materials. For example, superhydrophobic sponge
was usually used for adsorbing oil droplets or oil spills from water, while
superhydrophobic fabric or mesh was usually used for separating bulk layered
oil/water mixture. Therefore, developing simple and low-cost mussel-inspired
surface modification strategy toward superhydrophobic materials, as well as
diverse application modes for oil/water separation, is still highly desired. In
this study, superhydrophobic sponge and fabric with nanostructures, which
exhibits excellent performance for diverse oil/water separation, have been
fabricated through a novel one-step and cost-effective mussel-inspired
approach. The resultant superhydrophobic sponge exhibits outstanding oil
absorption capability (weight gains up to 8860%), while the superhydrophobic
fabric can effectively separate oil/water mixture. Moreover, diverse modes for
oil/water separation have been developed for the first time. For example,
water-in-oil emulsion can be highly-efficient separated by a compressed
superhydrophobic sponge (~1800L m-2 h-1 bar-1
for water-in-oil emulsion, and above 99% rejection rate for water droplets),
while crude oil spills can be efficiently collected by a superhydrophobic boat
(above 98%).