Superhydrophobic and oleophilic barium sulfate material for oil spill clean-ups: Fabrication of surface modified sorbent by a one-step interaction approach

• Superhydrophobic/oleophilic barium sulfate powder was prepared by one-step process.
• The prepared powder shows superhydrophobicity with a water contact angle of 152.4°.
• It has high selectivity and rapid oil uptake capacity with sufficient buoyancy.
• The material is found to be reusable, cost-effective and efficient for oil uptake.
• Hence, it can be commercially utilized for oil clean up by making booms or pillows.

Oil spill in ocean is considered to be a serious problem for the environmental scientists, since monitoring and cleaning processes are difficult in the dynamic ocean system. Out of many approaches adopted by different scientific groups, development of cheaper, eco-friendly and re-usable sorbent materials possessing sufficient buoyancy, good selectivity and high rate of uptake has drawn great attention. In the present study, superhydrophobic and oleophilic barium sulfate sorbent powder (water contact angle 152 ± 1°) were prepared by surface modification of pure barium sulfate with palmitic acid in a one-step interaction approach, and characterized by XRD, FT-IR, and SEM. The hydrophobic and oleophilic nature of the fabricated powder was confirmed by various laboratory experiments and contact angle measurements. The powder also possesses high selectivity towards oil and sufficient buoyancy to serve as a potential candidate for oil spill clean-ups. Further, the reusability experiments show that the as-prepared sorbent material is reusable for minimum three times for oil sorption.

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