Evaluation of wool based novel nanocomposites as an oil/water separator in purification industries

Increasing oil pollution problems, caused by accidental crude oil spills and the discharge of oily wastewater produced from industrial behavior, have raised extensive attention and led to the hot topic of oil/water separation. The application of nanotechnology and nanostructures has grown dramatically, and so far, there has been a lot of research on the synthesis of organic nanostructures and their application to textiles, among which commercial use of Titanium dioxide nanoparticles as photocatalyst in the field of water separation and oil has become widespread in the world. In this work, a facile, environmentally friendly approach is presented to fabricate novel nanocomposites with the ability to superhydrophobicity. We prepared these nanocomposites using mussel-inspired chemistry. So that Titanium dioxide nanoparticles were prepared, using polymerization of Poly Dopamine in the first layer and Nano-silver in the second layer. Then, the final composite introduced into matrix of natural wool with different densities to become a Nano-filter. Then, the performance of all nanocomposites was investigated during oil/ water separation. The results obtained from measuring the contact angle indicate that Woolen felt/TiO2-PDA/Ag nanocomposite with a density of 1.650 gr/cm3 has the contact angle of 155.14° and its highly desirable performance with the time of separation and passing water is 4:19: 120 and 1:37: 100 respectively.

Keywords:

oil/water separation , Titanium dioxide nanoparticles , Woolen felt , mussel-inspired chemistry