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Joule-heated carbonized melamine sponge for high-speed absorption of viscous oil spills

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Abstract

Introducing heating function to oil sorbents opens up a new pathway to the fast cleanup of viscous crude oil spills in situ. The oil sorption speed increases with the rise of the temperature, thus oil sorbents with high heating temperature are desirable. Besides, the oil sorbents also need to be produced environment-friendly. Here we present carbonized melamine-formaldehyde sponges (CMSs) that exhibited superior heating performance and the CMSs could be massively fabricated through a non-polluting pyrolysis process. The conductive CMSs could be heated over 300 °C with a low applied voltage of 6.9 V and keep above 250 °C for 30 min in the air without obvious damage. Such high heating performance enabled heating up the oil spills with a high rate of 2.65 °C·s−1 and 14% improvement of oil sorption coefficient compared with the state-of-the-art value. We demonstrated that one joule-heated CMS could continuously and selectively collect viscous oil spills (9,010 mPa·s) 690 times its own weight in one hour. The CMSs will be a highly competitive sorbent material for the fast remediation of future crude oil spills.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledged the funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51732011, 21431006, 21761132008, 81788101, 11227901, and 21805188), the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21521001), Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (No. QYZDJ-SSW-SLH036), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2014CB931800), the Users with Excellence and Scientific Research Grant of Hefei Science Center of CAS (No. 2015HSC-UE007), Anhui Initiative in Quantum Information Technologies (No. AHY050000), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. WK6030000077).

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  1. Lu-An Shi and Jin Ge contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Nanomaterials and Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Department of Chemistry, Institute of Biomimetic Materials & Chemistry, Anhui Engineering Laboratory of Biomimetic Materials, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Lu-An Shi, Jin Ge, Bi-Cheng Hu, Tao Ma, Haoyu Zhao, Yong-Hong Song, Chao Li & Shu-Hong Yu

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  1. Lu-An Shi
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Correspondence to Shu-Hong Yu.

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Shi, LA., Ge, J., Hu, BC. et al. Joule-heated carbonized melamine sponge for high-speed absorption of viscous oil spills. Nano Res. 14, 2697–2702 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-3274-y

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