Bio-Inspired Textiles for Self-Driven Oil-Water Separation-A Simulative Analysis of Fluid Transport.

In addition to water repellency, superhydrophobic leaves of plants such as adsorb oil and separate it from water surfaces. This phenomenon has been the inspiration for a new method of oil-water separation, the bionic oil adsorber (BOA). In this paper, we show how the biological effect can be abstracted and transferred to technical textiles, in this case knitted spacer textiles hydrophobized with a layered silicate, oriented at the biology push approach.

Oil adsorbing and transporting surfaces: a simulative determination of parameters for bionic functional textiles.

Certain superhydrophobic plants, such as, are able to adsorb oil films from water surfaces and thus separate the oil from the water. There are first attempts to transfer this phenomenon to technical surfaces, but the functional principle and the influence of certain parameters are not yet fully understood. The aim of this work is to understand the interaction behavior between biological surfaces and oil, and to define design parameters for transferring the biological model to a technical textile.