مشخصات پژوهش

Producing large quantities of oily wastewater by numerous industries, especially oil refineries and petroleum companies, and strict environmental regulations in this field increased the demand for developing modern technologies among researchers in recent decades [1],[2]. Settling, flotation, and oil skimming are the main traditional methods for oil-water separation. These approaches have low efficiency and are unsuitable for separating emulsified oil phase from wastewater [3]. In addition, these methods have many drawbacks such as high energy consumption, high cost, and usually require secondary treatment. Using surface engineering and fabrication mesh membranes with antagonistic wettability to oil and water phases are a novel technology researchers started their studies in this field in 2004. For the first time in 2004, superhydrophobic PTFE-coated mesh was fabricated to separate diesel oil from water by Feng et al. [4]. The results exhibited excellent separation efficiency (>98%) for diesel-water mixtures. Since then, various research has been performed in this field, and tremendous superhydrophobic-coated meshes have been fabricated using different methods such as chemical deposition method [5], [6], [7], hydrothermal [8], layer-by-layer [9],[10], and chemical vapor deposition method (CVD) [11]. The superhydrophobic surfaces are commonly constructed in two steps, including fabricating rough structures and their modification by low surface energy materials like fluoropolymers, silane agents, and fatty acids [3],[12],[13]. Zhou et al. [14] grew copper hydroxide nanoneedles on the copper mesh using the chemical oxidation method. The coated mesh was modified by stearic acid to achieve superhydrophobicity. Hsieh and coworkers [15] developed a fluorinated carbon nanotube (CNT) coating on the carbon fabric by the spin coating method. Superhydrophobic Cu@Ag copper mesh was prepared by acid etching and replacement reaction and modification by n-dodecanethiol (DDT) [16].