Joule-heated carbonized melamine sponge for high-speed absorption of viscous oil spills

• Published in: Nano research Vol. 14; no. 8; pp. 2697 - 2702
• Main Authors: Shi, Lu-An, Ge, Jin, Hu, Bi-Cheng, Ma, Tao, Zhao, Haoyu, Song, Yong-Hong, Li, Chao, Yu, Shu-Hong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Beijing Tsinghua University Press 01.08.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Atomic/Molecular Structure and Spectra; Biomedicine; Biotechnology; Chemistry and Materials Science; Competitive materials; Condensed Matter Physics; Crude oil; Environmental cleanup; Heating; Materials Science; Melamine; Nanotechnology; Oil spills; Pyrolysis; Research Article; Sorbents; Sorption; hydrophobic/oleophilic; viscosity; crude oil; melamine sponge; joule-heat
• ISSN: 1998-0124; 1998-0000
• DOI: 10.1007/s12274-020-3274-y

Introducing heating function to oil sorbents opens up a new pathway to the fast cleanup of viscous crude oil spills in situ . The oil sorption speed increases with the rise of the temperature, thus oil sorbents with high heating temperature are desirable. Besides, the oil sorbents also need to be produced environment-friendly. Here we present carbonized melamine-formaldehyde sponges (CMSs) that exhibited superior heating performance and the CMSs could be massively fabricated through a non-polluting pyrolysis process. The conductive CMSs could be heated over 300 °C with a low applied voltage of 6.9 V and keep above 250 °C for 30 min in the air without obvious damage. Such high heating performance enabled heating up the oil spills with a high rate of 2.65 °C·s −1 and 14% improvement of oil sorption coefficient compared with the state-of-the-art value. We demonstrated that one joule-heated CMS could continuously and selectively collect viscous oil spills (9,010 mPa·s) 690 times its own weight in one hour. The CMSs will be a highly competitive sorbent material for the fast remediation of future crude oil spills.