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Published May 22, 2012 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Superhydrophobic Alkanethiol-Coated Microsubmarines for Effective Removal of Oil

Abstract

We demonstrate the use of artificial nanomachines for effective interaction, capture, transport, and removal of oil droplets. The simple nanomachine-enabled oil collection method is based on modifying microtube engines with a superhydrophobic layer able to adsorb oil by means of its strong adhesion to a long chain of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of alkanethiols created on the rough gold outer surface of the device. The resultant SAM-coated Au/Ni/PEDOT/Pt microsubmarine displays continuous interaction with large oil droplets and is capable of loading and transporting multiple small oil droplets. The influence of the alkanethiol chain length, polarity, and head functional group and hence of the surface hydrophobicity upon the oil–nanomotor interaction and the propulsion is examined. No such oil–motor interactions were observed in control experiments involving both unmodified microengines and microengines coated with SAM layers containing a polar terminal group. These results demonstrate that such SAM-Au/Ni/PEDOT/Pt micromachines can be useful for a facile, rapid, and efficient collection of oils in water samples, which can be potentially exploited for other water–oil separation systems. The integration of oil-sorption properties into self-propelled microengines holds great promise for the remediation of oil-contaminated water samples and for the isolation of other hydrophobic targets, such as drugs.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Chemical Society. Received 16 March 2012. Date accepted 5 April 2012. Published online 5 April 2012. Published in print 22 May 2012. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF Award Number CBET 0853375) and NATO Science for Peace and Security Program (SfP 983807). M. Guix acknowledges the support from Spanish MICINN. J. Orozco and M. García are thankful for funding from a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship (Government of Catalonia) and University of Alcalá (Madrid), respectively. The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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August 19, 2023
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