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Language: English

Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received February 20, 2023
Revised April 1, 2023
Accepted May 1, 2023

Acknowledgements: This research output was supported by Sultan Qaboos University and Qatar University for collaborative research funding project (CL/SQU-QU/SCI/20/01).

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Fabrication of g-C3N4 nanosheets on stainless steel mesh for effective separation of oil from water

Nada Saeed Al-Kindi^{1 2} Faisal Al Marzouqi³ Majeda Khraisheh⁴ Younghun Kim^5† Rengaraj Selvaraj^1†

¹Department of Chemistry, College of Science, Sultan Qaboos University, P. O. Box 36, P.C. 123, Al-Khoudh, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman ²Department of Applied Sciences, University of Technology and Applied Science, Alkuwair 133, Muscat, P. O. 74, Sultanate of Oman ³Department of Engineering, International Maritime College Oman, National University, P. O. Box: 532, PC: 322, Falaj Al Qabail, Suhar, Sultanate of Oman ⁴Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar University, Doha P. O. Box 2713, Qatar ⁵Department of Chemical Engineering, Kwangwoon University, Seoul 01891, Korea

korea1@kw.ac.kr, rengaraj@squ.edu.om

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, November 2023, 40(11), 2744-2750(7), 10.1007/s11814-023-1479-y

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Abstract

Most industries depend mainly on oil and oil-based processes, which resulted in producing large volumes of oily wastewater. One of the most common methods used for the treatment of oily contaminated water is filtration by modified surfaces. In this research g-C3N4 nanostructured material was prepared via thermal condensation method. The samples were characterized by advanced techniques such as XRD, XPS, FTIR scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectrophotometry (EDX). The result showed that g-C3N4 were crystallized in tri-striazine phases and their mean crystalline sizes of these nanostructures were 12.17 nm. The high-magnification microscopy images show that the morphology of g-C3N4 was nanosheet. A stainless-steel mesh was modified and coated with the prepared g-C3N4 nanostructured materials to be used for the separation of oil and water mixture. Due to the hydrophobic nature of the modified meshes, oil drops spread over the mesh surface and the water drops form spherical shapes. The most efficient coating among all the modified meshes was g-C3N4, which was functionalized using silane moiety. The separation efficiency of this coated mesh reached 74.87% and it resulted in fast separation. This mesh can separate different types of oil from the oil/water mixture, such as toluene, mineral oil, 2-ethyl-1-hexanol, and n-pentane with good efficiency. Separation was repeated up to 40 times using the same mesh, and the separation efficiency was measured each time

Keywords

Oil-water Separation Oily Wastewater Mesh, g-C3N4

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