Developing a facile large-scale strategy to fabricate polymer foams with excellent wettability and recycling its counterpart for oil-water separation is in urgent demand. Here, a facile template-free thermally impacted water-induced phase separation approach for the fabrication of skin-free thermoplastic polyurethane foam with a water contact angle of 147°, porosity more than 90%, density less than 14 mg cm-3 , and excellent compressibility (>1000 cycles) is proposed. The foams show high efficiency of oil recovery (>98%) during the squeezing and pumping oil-water separation test. Moreover, the used foams could be recycled and reused to form refresh foams without sacrificing their high performance, which makes this method a promising prospect for environmental applications.
Keywords: phase separation; polyurethanes; recycling; thermoplastics.
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