IIT Guwahati researchers develop material for separating oil and water

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has developed a graphene-based superhydrophobic material that can separate oil and water from both oil-in-water and water-in-oil emulsions, respectively.

A team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has developed a graphene-based superhydrophobic material that can separate oil and water from both oil-in-water and water-in-oil emulsions, respectively.

Oil-water separation techniques have a number of industrial and environmental applications. In order to absorb oil from oil-water emulsions, different porous and bulk substrates such as a sponge that are made superhydrophobic have been used.

IIT Guwahati team has shown the efficacy of hierarchically structured graphene oxide nanosheets in removing oil or aqueous contaminates from respective emulsions, thereby effecting the separation of oil and water.

Superhydrophobic material has extreme water repellence quality and is considered to be the best material for removing oil from water. It is extensively studied for applications such as water purification and self-cleaning surfaces. The problem with superhydrophobic materials is that they are generally not scalable, or use environmentally toxic products such as fluorinated polymers/small molecules, or have poor mechanical and chemical stability.

Moreover, the conventional spongy superhydrophobic materials are inherently less appropriate for separating oil-in-water emulsion due to poor accessibility of the dispersed oil droplets to the oil-absorbing superhydrophobic interface.

“The hydrophobicity of materials is largely governed by the physical architecture and the chemical composition, and so such materials can be rationally created by combining low-surface-energy materials with hierarchical roughness”, explained one of the researchers.

This is exactly what the group has done in its quest for oil-water separating materials. They have manipulated graphene, a form of carbon, to have superhydrophobic properties suitable for separation of oil from water in emulsions.

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