Abstract
Oil spills are a severe environmental pollution in water ecosystems, causing substantial rupture to living things and the environment. On the other hand, developing porous foam substances with good mechanical robustness, surface hydrophobicity is strongly needed for various applications, but it is challenging to realize these functionalities simultaneously in a facile approach. In this study, oil-absorbing rubbery foams were produced from an (SBR-NR) blend with the addition of sodium bicarbonate as a blowing agent. The (SiO2@GO) nanohybrid composites, which have the good assets of the both nanomaterials, were synthesized in our previous work. In this work nanohybrids were silanized with vinyltriethoxysilane (VTES) at two concentrations and then applied to rubbery foam. The nonpolar interactions between VTES grafted nanohybrids (within the rubbery foam) and oil and the escalated capillary force in the micropores, enables the rubber composite to absorb more oil in water. The optimized nanocomposite foams (i.e. SG1V(10X)@SBR-NR and SG2V(20X)@SBR-NR) had water contact angles of 133○ and 142○, respectively. Likewise, the porous oleophilic rubbery foam showed an impressive adsorption capacity of 1.48 g/g for oil and organic solvents present in the oil/water mixture. Also, the rubbery foam exhibited high compressive deformation of about strain 80 % (50 MPa) for SG2V(20X)@SBR-NR sample. More momentously, the foam showed superior reusability and mechanical compression durability of at least 50 cycles, indicating its hopeful potential as an absorbent in practical oil/water separation.