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Hydrophobic Modification of Platanus Fruit Fibers as Natural Hollow Fibrous Sorbents for Oil Spill Cleanup

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Abstract

The Platanus fruit fibers (PFFs) with unique hollow tubular structures were successfully utilized in the preparation of an efficient oil sorbents for the first time by chemical modification with acetic anhydride. The structure and morphology of the pristine PFFs (p-PFFs) and acetylated PFFs (a-PFFs) were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The effects of acetic anhydride to PFFs ratio, catalyst concentration, reaction temperature, and time on the weight percent gain (WPG) and oil sorption capacity were particularly investigated in detail. The results showed the hydrophobic modification of p-PFFs contributed to the enhancement of the sorption capacity of a-PFFs for various oils and organic solvents. The sorption kinetic analysis indicated the oil sorption data were fitted well with a pseudo-second-order kinetic model. And the oil-filled a-PFFs exhibited high oil retention ability with less than 30 % of the sorbed oil lost after 2-h dripping. Moreover, a-PFFs showed little loss of initial sorption capacities after eight sorbing/desorbing cycles with the recovery of sorbents by n-hexane extraction. The natural renewable a-PFFs are proved to be a promising candidate for large-scale removal of spilled oils from water.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (Grant 2015JQ5173) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant 310829162016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Subsurface Hydrology and Ecological Effects in Arid Region, Chang’an University, Xi’an, 710054, People’s Republic of China

    Li Yang, Ziru Wang, Xu Li, Liheng Yang, Changyu Lu & Shan Zhao

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  1. Li Yang
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  2. Ziru Wang
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  3. Xu Li
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  4. Liheng Yang
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  5. Changyu Lu
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  6. Shan Zhao
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Correspondence to Li Yang.

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Li Yang and Ziru Wang did the same work quantity as co-first authors.

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Yang, L., Wang, Z., Li, X. et al. Hydrophobic Modification of Platanus Fruit Fibers as Natural Hollow Fibrous Sorbents for Oil Spill Cleanup. Water Air Soil Pollut 227, 346 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-016-3043-4

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