Abstract
Cleaning of oil contaminated water channels is of an absolute significance for aquatic habitats, oceanography and in environmental protection. Aerogels are envisaged suitable materials for such applications due to their inter-esting properties. Polypropylene is widely used material for such applications but being not biodegradable and non-renewable needs to be replaced with other economical, non-toxic and biodegrade materials. In this work, lignin a renewable material, was chosen as blend material with a non-toxic and environmental friendly polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) matrix for the fabrication of lignin polyvinyl alcohol (LP) aerogels. These materials show prom-ising features in terms of high porosity (95.25%), low density (0.033), considerable surface area (BET) (7.20 m(2)/ g) along with an adequate surface morphology. The water contents additionally played a positive role in increasing the surface area (7.20 m(2)/g) with water addition. The aerogels after coating with Tetraethyl Ortho-silicate were applied to study the diesel adsorption test showed an uptake of 10.10 g/g of diesel. Moreover, these aerogels showed a good durability during their reusability of even up to 4 cycles. It can be anticipated that lignin/PVA aerogels can be employed for oil spillage applications keeping in view their non-toxic behaviour.