Separation of oils from wastewater using ZIF-67 coated filtering structures

Abstract

Along with growing human population in last decades, the demand for energy and food have been steadily increased. Especially in densely populated areas, this trend has led to depletion of water resources and environmental pollution, resulting in loss of ecosystems and putting both human and animal life in danger. Significantly industrial sectors with higher water consumption rate produce larger scale of wastewater, and oil and organic compounds in their wastewater play a crucial role in damaging ecosystems. As a result, to overcome the negative consequences of oil pollution, many treatment methods have been developed with their particular advantages and disadvantages each. Namely, the oil separation from water emulsion is a crucial part of all these techniques, and inventing more efficient oil sorbents is the key objective in developing such systems. In this context, ZIFs with their large surface area, exhibit high oil sorption capacity and therefore, have considerable potential to be used for oil/water separation applications.

In this research, by deposition of ZIF-67 on melamine sponge in four different temperatures, hydrophobic H/ZIF-67/MS composites obtained, and the activation temperature to reach the optimum oil sorption capacity measured. The obtained composites showed excellent capacity to sorb a wide variety of oils and organic compounds up to 130 times of their weight, and might be considered for future development of oil separation systems.