Self-adhesive polyethersulfone polyurethane carbon nanotubes fiber reinforced aerogel and its application in oil-water separation

The direct discharge of oily wastewater will seriously pollute water ecology and human health. Aerogel is ideal candidate to remedy the oily wastewater, but facing challenges for the usage of toxic small molecules crosslinker and the construction of elasticity. Herein, we adopt fiber self-adhesion mode, not crosslinker, to construct aerogel with ultra-light, high elasticity and excellent oil-water separation performance. And then, polyethersulfone/ polyurethane/multi wall carbon nanotubes (PES/PU/MWCNTs) fiber aerogels are prepared by freeze-drying and heat treatment, and their ability to separate oil from water is explored through flux and separation efficiency tests. The addition of MWCNTs can enhance the mechanical properties of aerogels, and the compression stress of aerogels with 10 wt% MWCNTs is up to 2.6003 kPa. The density of PES/PU/MWCNTs-x composite fiber aerogel is stable at about 20-30 mg cm- 3. By adjusting the content of MWCNTs, it is found that the aerogel with the parameter of 20 wt% MWCNTs has the best separation efficiency (99.97 %) and separation flux (32,897.67 L m- 2 h-1). Our work provides a simple and effective construction scheme of fiber aerogel to solve the problem of oilwater separation.