A Facile Solvent-Manipulated Mesh for Reversible Oil/Water Separation

A controllable oil/water separation
mesh has been successfully developed and easily manipulated by immersion
in a stearic acid ethanol solution and tetrahydrofuran with a very
short period of time. The superhydrophilic and underwater superoleophobic
mesh is first obtained via a one-step chemical oxidation and subsequently
converts to superhydrophobic after it is immersed in an ethanol solution
of stearic acid for 5 min. The
surface wettability is regained to superhydrophilic quickly by immersion
in tetrahydrofuran for 5 min. More importantly, the reversible superhydrophobic-and-superhydrophilic
switching can be repeated multiple times with almost no visible morphology
variation. Therefore, this approach provides potential application
in controllable oil/water separation and opens up new perspectives
in manipulation of various metallic oxide substrates.