3D graphitic carbon sphere foams as sorbents for cleaning oil spills

Frequent offshore oil spill accidents, industrial oily sewage and the indiscriminate disposal of urban oily sewage have caused serious impacts on human living environment and health. The traditional oil-water separation methods not only cause easily environmental secondary pollution, but also waste of limited resources. Therefore, in this work, 3D graphitic carbon sphere foams (3D-foams) possessed three-dimensional porous structure with pore size distribution of 25~200 μm, and high porosity of 62% were prepared for oil adsorption via foam-gel casting method using graphitic carbon spheres as starting materials. The resulted indicated that the water contact angle of as-prepared 3D-foams was 130°. The contents of graphitic carbon spheres (GCS) greatly influenced the hydrophobicity, water contact angle (WCA) and microstructure of the as-prepared samples. The adsorption capacities of as-prepared 3D-foams for paraffin oil, vegetable oil and vacuum pump oil were about 12~15 g/g, which were 10 times of that graphitic carbon spheres powder.