Facile fabrication of superhydrophobic copper hydroxide coated mesh for effective separation of water-in-oil emulsions

Abstract Recently, the super-wetting materials for separating oil/water emulsions have attracted great attention. Developing a low-cost and high-efficient filter material that is challenging to separate stable oil/water emulsions efficiently. In this work, the superhydrophobic copper hydroxide coated mesh was successfully fabricated through a facile spraying and surface modification approach. The excellent separation property of the as-prepared material with efficiency greater than 99.0% under the driving of gravity. Furthermore, the as-developed SCM retained the favorable recyclability and excellent stability even after 10 reuses. More importantly, the SCM exhibited excellent mechanical abrasion resistance after 50 abrasion cycles with sandpaper, which could still remove water from emulsions and possessed excellent separation efficiency. Therefore, the newly developed materials with special wettability have excellent potential in practical use and provide a novel perspective for preparation of stable emulsions separation materials.