Developing Hydrophobic Graphene Foam for Oil Spill Cleanup

Oil spills have been responsible for a number of environmental problems such as water pollution, subsequent danger to aquatic life, along with massive oil losses. Such disasters have stimulated the need for development of novel materials with improved sorption capacity for oil-spill cleanup. Among various available methods, the use of adsorbents holds great promises to remove and recover oil from minor or major spills. In the present work, we report the development of hydrothermally reduced graphene oxide foam (RGO) functionalized with Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) for sorption of oil. MNP were used to produce RGO-MNP hybrid foams which could be separated by a magnetic field. The synthesized RGO and RGO-MNP hybrid foams were characterized by using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis. Motor oil was used as the adsorbate to determine the sorption capacity of the produced foams. Experimental results revealed that graphene foam is an excellent candidate to be used as a sorbent for oil spill cleanup due to its high specific surface area and hydrophobicity.