The frequent occurrence of oil spills not only results in the waste of petroleum resources, but also poses a serious threat to the marine ecological environment. Considering the large amount of crude oils with high viscosity, it is urgent to develop an adsorbent capable of efficiently reducing the viscosity for the cleanup of oil spills. Inspired by the “lotus effect” and “poikilotherm which utilize the solar energy for thermoregulation”, the low surface energy material polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and polypyrrole (PPy) were loaded over the island nonwoven fabric to fabricate a novel crude oil adsorbent material. Wherein, the fluorine-free PDMS was used to hydrophobically modify the nonwoven fabric, endowing it with excellent oil-water separation performance, with a separation efficiency of up to 95%. After 10 cycles, the separation efficiency of PPy/PDMS modified nonwoven fabric (PPy/PDMS@NF) was still above 90%, demonstrating superior recyclability. In addition, the PPy/PDMS@NF possessed the self-cleaning capabilities. Under one sun illumination (1.0 kW/m2), the surface temperature of the PPy/PDMS@NF reached to 60.7 ℃, and its adsorption capacity for high-viscosity crude oil reached to 7 gcrude oil/gsorbent. Thanks to its environmental friendliness and excellent adsorption capacity, this work provides a new option for dealing with the high-viscosity marine oil spill.

Sorbent with a great quantity of highly dispersed active components is of importance to achieve excellent desulfurization performance. Thus, Zn@MnOx/porous carbon nanofibers (PCNFs) sorbents have been constructed via electrospinning, carbonization, activation and hydrothermal techniques in this study. The as-prepared sorbent realizes a sulfur capacity of 9.63 g S 100 g-1 sorbent and a utilization rate 117% of ZnO, which could be attributed to the synergetic effects of the enlarged surface area of PCNFs and uniformly distributed active components. The specific surface area of modified PCNFs is nearly five times higher than that of the pristine CNFs, providing larger loading area and more attachment sites for metal oxides. Activation with KMnO4 not only generates active MnOx components but also presets ‘seed’ for ZnO crystals growth, which is beneficial for the high dispersion of nano-sized active components. The presented method is beneficial to producing sorbents with better structure and promoted desulfurization performance.

Owing to the complicated environments, the service life of bag-filter or electrostatic-bag composite precipitators with polyphenylene sulfide (PPS)-based bag-filter materials is greatly deviated from the ideal time. In this paper, the structural transformation of PPS-based bag filter materials collected from the coal-fired power plants with different loading units were investigated systematically. As the SO2 content increases, the surface evolution of PPS fibers from smoothness to crack occurs.The major reason for the failure of PPS-based bag filters is that working temperature (T) often passes through acid dew gas point (Ta), and the SO3 would be produced during the condensing of H2SO4 when T is lower than Ta. This work discloses the actual structural evolution of PPS and some corresponding rules under the complicated corrosive gases with high temperatures, which provides a guidance for prolonging the service life of PPS-based bag filters during the usage of coal-fired power plant