Abstract

Materials with selective wettabilities are widely used for effective liquid separation in environmental protection and the chemical industry. Current liquid separation strategies are primarily based on covalent modification to control the membranes’ surface energy, or are based on gating mechanisms to accurately tune the gating threshold of the transport substance. Herein, we demonstrate a simple and universal polarity-based protocol to regulate the wetting behavior of superamphiphilic porous nanofibrous membranes by infusing a high polar component of surface energy liquid into the membranes, forming a relatively stable liquid-infusion-interface to repel the immiscible low polar component of surface energy liquid. Even immiscible liquids with a surface energy difference as small as 2 mJ m−2, or emulsions stabilized by emulsifiers can be effectively separated. Furthermore, the infused liquid can be substituted by another immiscible liquid with a higher polar component of surface energy, affording successive separation of multiphase liquids.

Details

Title
Infused-liquid-switchable porous nanofibrous membranes for multiphase liquid separation
Author
Wang, Yang 1 ; Di, Jiancheng 1 ; Wang, Li 2 ; Xu, Li 1 ; Wang, Ning 1 ; Wang, Baixian 1 ; Tian, Ye 3 ; Jiang, Lei 4 ; Yu, Jihong 5 

 State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun, China 
 Key Laboratory of Bio-inspired Materials and Interfacial Science, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 
 Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), Key Laboratory of Green Printing, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 
 Key Laboratory of Bio-inspired Materials and Interfacial Science, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 
 State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun, China; International Center of Future Science, Jilin University, Changchun, China 
Pages
1-7
Publication year
2017
Publication date
Sep 2017
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20411723
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1940168726
Copyright
© 2017. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.