High-throughput clean-up of viscous oil spills enabled by a gel-coated mesh filter

Crude oil spills, resulting from transportation, drilling or accident, are a severe threat to the aqueous environment. However, crude oil with high viscosity makes the clean-up of oil spills a global challenge in practice because highly viscous oil has low fluidity, making it hard to separate and recover. Here we demonstrate a gel-coated superhydrophobic and oleophilic mesh filter coupled with induction-heating strategy for high-throughput clean-up of viscous oil spill. The direct silane treatment of polyaniline gel with covalent reaction endows the material with robust superwetting properties, which enables the mesh filter to have a high viscous oil separation flux of 2.43 l m⁻² s⁻¹. An oil-collecting roller prototype is developed for the recovery of viscous oil spills through the reversibly interfacial process of oil collection and filtration. The continuous clean-up and recovery of viscous oil spills are simultaneously achieved with a high oil recovery rate of up to 1,400.6 kg m⁻² h⁻¹ and a separation efficiency of 99%. This work provides a powerful tool for efficient and high-throughput clean-up of highly viscous oil spills, paving the way to better management of the damage from oil spills.