A General Strategy for the Separation of Immiscible Organic Liquids by Manipulating the Surface Tensions of Nanofibrous Membranes.
Oil/water separation membranes with different wettability towards water are attractive for their economic efficiency and convenience. The key factor for the separation process is the roughness-enhanced wettability of membranes based on the intrinsic wetting threshold (IWT) of water, that is, the limitation of the wettability caused by hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity. However, the separation of organic liquids (OLs) remains a challenge. Herein, we manipulate the surface tensions of nanofibrous membranes to lie between the IWTs of the two OLs to be separated so that the nanofibrous membranes can be endowed with superlyophobicity and superlyophilicity for the two liquids, and thus lead to successful separation. Our investigations provide a general strategy to separate any immiscible liquids efficiently, and may lead to the development of membranes with a large capacity, high flux, and high selectivity for organic reactions or liquid extraction in chemical engineering.
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190 (P.R. China).
Li
L
Wang
School of Chemistry and Environment, Beihang University, Beijing 100191 (P.R. China).
Yong
Y
Zhao
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190 (P.R. China). tianyely@iccas.ac.cn.
Ye
Y
Tian
Laboratory of Bio-inspired Smart Interfacial Science, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190 (China), or. jianglei@iccas.ac.cn.|School of Chemistry and Environment, Beihang University, Beijing 100191 (P.R. China). jianglei@iccas.ac.cn.
Lei
L
Jiang
lyophilicity; lyophobicity; membranes; organic liquid separation; surface chemistry