A sustainable layered nanofiber/sheet aerogels enabling repeated life cycles for effective oil/water separation

Discarded oil-containing absorbents, which has been used in handling oil spills, are tricky to deal with and have rose global environmental concerns regarding release of microplastics. Herein, we developed a facile strategy to fabricate sustainable absorbents by a gas-inflating method, through which 2D electrospinning polycaprolactone nanofiber membranes were directly inflated into highly porous 3D nanofiber/sheet aerogels with layered long fiber structure. The membranes were inflated rapidly from a baseline porosity of 81.98% into 97.36–99.42% in 10–60 min. The obtained aerogels were further wrapped with -CH3 ended siloxane structures using CH3SiCl3. This hydrophobic absorbent (CA ≈ 145°) could rapidly trap oils from water with sorption range of 25.60–42.13 g/g and be recycled by simple squeeze due to its mechanical robustness. As-prepared aerogels also showed high separation efficiency to separate oils from both oil/water mixtures and oil-in-water emulsions (>96.4%). Interestingly, the oil-loaded absorbent after cleaning with absolute ethanol could be re-dissolved in selected solvents and promptly reconstituted by re-electrospinning and gas-inflation. The reconstituted aerogels were used as fire-new oil absorbents for repeated life cycles. The novel design, low cost and sustainability of the absorbent provides an efficient and environmentally-friendly solution for handling oil spills.