A flexible green strategy to prepare polytetrafluoroethylene nanofibrous membranes with tailored structure for high-performance filtration applications

Industrial wastewater and oily effluents pose severe environmental and health risks, necessitating efficient and sustainable separation technologies. Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) microporous membranes are among the most widely used separation materials in extensive applications involving separation, filtration, and insulation, but the traditional processing approaches require high energy consumption and large amounts of environmentally unfriendly agents. This study presents a comparatively more environmentally benign strategy to fabricate PTFE nanofibrous membranes via an in-situ fibrillation method with a water-soluble processing agent. The resulting membranes exhibit highly entangled fibrous network microstructures, achieving tunable pore sizes (0.16–1.30 μm), high porosity (72–78%), and excellent mechanical strength (up to 28.6 MPa). Moreover, their hydrophobicity and oleophilicity enable outstanding oil-water separation efficiency (>99%) with gravity-driven fluxes up to 3980 L m −2  h −1 . The membranes exhibit >98% rejection of SiO 2 (dispersed in strong base solutions) and carboxylate CNTs (dispersed in strong acid solutions) under vacuum filtration, while maintaining excellent antifouling performance and recyclability. This work provides a facile and comparatively environmentally benign and scalable route to high-performance PTFE porous membranes, offering promising potential for industrial wastewater treatment, emulsion purification, and solid-liquid separation applications.