Melamine Formaldehyde-Based Suitable Porous Sorbents for Toxic Industrial Dye Removal and Ultra-Fast Oil Spill Recovery

Abstract

Rapid industrialization and urbanization pose severe threats to water pollution during oil spill/leakage, and organic effluent discharge into water bodies may have a terrible impact on the aquatic ecosystem. Therefore, specialty of porous sorbents suitable for quick oil-water separation have attracted tremendous academic and industrial interest in the past several years. The ability of three-dimensional porous sorbents to separate and recover lost oil from water is considered an efficient, eco-friendly, and cost-effective strategy. In the present work, we demonstrate the preparation of porous carbon spheres modified superhydrophobic melamine formaldehyde sponge (PCS@MF) for ultra-fast oil-water separation and industrial dye removal. In this regard, MF sponge was modified by PCS derived from resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF) polycondensation reaction using a dip coating method, followed by pyrolysis at a moderate temperature. XRD, FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, FESEM, and EDS confirm the successful surface modification of MF sponge by RF resin and the formation of PCS@MF sponge after carbonization. The PCS@MF sponge shows a contact angle of 169°, 79°, and 0° for sessile water droplets in air, water droplets in oil, and oil droplet in air, respectively. The PCS@MF sponge demonstrated absorption of numerous oil mixed with water by 68-85 times separation by its mass in the first cycle. Further, the RF resin and RF@MF sponge were explored for the removal of methylene blue dye with ~98% efficiency. The abovementioned findings have ample rationale to believe that the strategy adopted herein will provide an easy and environmentally benign method for synthesizing porous sorbents for wastewater treatment in future.