One-step construction of biomimetic catalytic membrane for soluble organic pollutants degradation and efficient insoluble oils separation

The oil-water separation field presents heightened challenges due to inherent variability in wastewater compositions, demanding advanced membrane systems that maintain consistent performance across entire treatment processes while simultaneously achieving high separation efficiency and effectively addressing both soluble and insoluble contaminants. Nevertheless, the increasing demands for performance are inherently tied to complex manufacturing procedures and insufficient robustness, which impede the advancement of membrane technology. This study employs a one-step “synchronized embedding strategy” that harnesses the advantages of co-electrospinning to embed FeOCl/MoS 2 catalysts into polyethylene terephthalate (PET) membranes, successfully fabricating PET@FeOCl/MoS 2 catalytic membranes (PFM). The synergistic interplay between the low surface energy of PET and the high surface energy of FeOCl/MoS 2 creates a hierarchical biomimetic structure that emulates the structural properties of a beetle exoskeleton. The dual-scale biomimetic structure design imparts the membrane with superior demulsification efficiency and catalytic degradation performance. PFM achieves an extremely high separation efficiency (99.9 %) and an ultra-high flux (5373.0 L m −2  h −1 ) for surfactant-stabilized water-in-oil emulsions. Within just 2 min, a degradation rate of 94.2 % for rhodamine B (RhB) is achieved, which is comparable to other studies showing removal rates of up to 100 % within 30 min using different high performance catalyst systems. The developed strategy offers an innovative solution for addressing the persistent challenges in industrial water and oil-water purification through synergistic integration of structural biomimicry and catalytic functionality