Facile Preparation of the Porous PDMS Oil-Absorbent for Oil/Water Separation

Nowadays, oily wastewater and spilled oil have caused great threats on both ecosystem and human life. To address these severe problems, considerable efforts have been possessed on developing novel oil/water separation materials. The porous oil-absorbent materials, especially the porous polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with excellent properties of easy fabrication and inherent hydrophobicity, have attracted tremendous attentions from worldwide. The conventional methods using salt or sugar as sacrificial template and water as solvent have been widely adopted to fabricate the porous PDMS sponge. Due to the inherent hydrophobicity of PDMS, the solvent of water hardly penetrates into the inside of PDMS, which results in the difficult and incomplete remove of the hard template. In this contribution, the 3D interconnected porous PDMS sponge is facilely prepared by utilizing a modified technique with the citric acid monohydrate as hard template and ethanol as solvent. The proposed approach is capable of removing the hard template efficiently and thoroughly, which demonstrates promising utilizations in practical applications.