Superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic cotton fabric with photocatalytic function for high-efficiency oil-water separation and dye degradation

Traditional superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic materials show advantages in oil-water separation, however, they are generally unable to remove organic matter from complex oily wastewater. In this work, silver nanoparticles were successfully anchored on cotton fabric (CF) surface by in situ growth method to prepare CF@TP@Ag with photocatalytic function. Then, a multi-purpose superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic CF@TP@Ag@L-cysteine was constructed by hydrophilic modification of L-cysteine. Superhydrophilic/underwater superhydrophobic CF@TP@Ag@L-cysteine not only features outstanding oil-water separation properties, but also exhibits superior reusability. Among them, for the unmixed-phase toluene/water mixture, the flux and efficiency were 10,088.15 +/- 120.3 L m- 2 h- 1 and 98.6 %, respectively. Importantly, this superhydrophilic/ underwater superoleophobic CF@TP@Ag@L-cysteine possessed good photodegradation performance, with the degradation rate reaching 91.7 % in 90 min for 30 mL of 40 mg/L of methyl blue solution under visible light. Furthermore, the water-wetted superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic CF@TP@Ag@L-cysteine is resistant to crude oil contamination and possesses self-cleaning ability. Meanwhile, the superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic CF@TP@Ag@L-cysteine showed good stability in various stability tests.