Fabrication of polystyrene fibers with tunable co-axial hollow tubing structure for oil spill cleanup

• DOI: 10.1016/j.apsusc.2016.01.033
• Publication Date: 2016-01-19T03:14:31Z
• Authors: Minxin Zhang; Jiafu Chen; Bingjing Chen; Jingjing Cao; Min Hong; Chenxu Zhou; Qun Xu
• Keywords: Polystyrene

Abstract Hollow tubing polystyrene (PS) fibers (HFs) with porous shell were successfully fabricated through co-axial electrospinning and selectively dissolving and removing polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) core of the co-axial PS/PVP fibers using C2H5OH at room temperature. The size of co-axial hollow tubing structure (CHTS) and the thickness of shell can be controlled by varying the feed rate ratio of the core solution to the shell solution. The oil-sorption results show that the oil-sorption capacity increases with the increasing of the size of CHTS in the HFs, and the HFs have higher oil-sorption capacities than the porous PS fibers (PFs) without CHTS. It is noticeable that the diesel sorption capacity (66 g/g) of the HFs is approximately 1.74 times as much as that (38 g/g) of the PFs. The motor oil sorption capacity (147 g/g) of the HFs is approximately 1.55 times as much as that (95 g/g) of the PFs. It is suggested that the HFs have a better oil-sorption performance than the PFs, especially for the low viscosity oil, which is contributed to large CHTS and high porosity.