Fabrication of thin fluoropolymer adhered cotton fabric surface for efficiently microscopic to macroscopic level oil/water separation

Wereport a simple oil-water separation technique using adhesively attached fluoropolymer coated cotton fabric prepared by the admicellar polymerization process. The modified cotton fabric shows hydrophobic/oleophilic properties with a high water contact angle of 126 degrees +/- 1 and an oil contact angle of similar to 0 degrees. For the oil-water separation, we used two techniques i.e. filtration-based and absorption-based separation. The modified cotton fabric can effectively separate a series of oil-water mixtures like kerosene/water (Gasoline), petrol/water, hexane/water, octane/water and decane/water with high efficiency. Among them, kerosene-water mixture shows approx similar to 93% separation efficiency even after repeated use for 10 cycles through an ordinary filtering process, without any noticeable change in efficiency. More importantly, the as-prepared fabric shows good recyclability after several separations. Therefore, this modified cotton fabric has the advantages of scalable fabrication, cost-effective preparation, low-energy consumption, high separation efficiency, and excellent recyclability.