Non-woven fabric coated with candle soot for water remediation

A hydrophobic non-woven fabric was fabricated using candle soot coatings. The coated fabric (CS-fabric) was hydrophobic and oleophilic. CS-fabric maintained a water contact angle of 142° over a longer period showed its durability. It exhibited high oil–water separation efficiency (95%) for the petrol-water mixture. CS-fabric (5.0 × 3.0 cm 2 ) was able to completely adsorb RB from 20 ml of dye’s aqueous solution within 30 min. Moreover, CS-fabric can be reused up to several cycles as it showed promising cyclic adsorption performance even after five cycles. It can also (single layer) completely adsorb detergent from detergent solution (concentration 0.5 g/l) within 60 min. The kinetic study showed that the pseudo-second-order kinetic model fitted best to the kinetic data.