In recent decades, pollution of many water sources in general, drinking water and agricultural water in particular, with crude oil hydrocarbons has formed one of the biggest environmental problems in the countries of our region in the middle east. Semiconductors with photocatalytic properties are an excellent technology that addresses this challenge. Titanium dioxide is one of the most commonly used photocatalysts in this field. In this project, nitrogen is the main non-metallic dopant due to its high chemical stability and low ionization energy, it is doped inside a titanium dioxide TiO2 structure by using sol-gel method, since the non-metallic elements as dopants have been received much attention based on the of energy band gap (Eg) reduction and decreasing the recombination rate and enhancing the photocatalytic activity. For the first layer, inspired by nature, (PDA) had been deposited on mesh. Then, the hydrophobic and micro/nano hierarchical structures generated in the non-drying layer by layer assembly process. So, the rigid building blocks of Na2SiO3 and N-TiO2 on to the SS/PDA surface was generated via five successive cycles, namely (SS/PDA/(Na2SiO3/N-TiO2)*5cycle). The modified meshes are characterized with FESEM/EDS, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, water contact angle (WCA) and oil contact angle (OCA) methods. The as-prepared coated mesh can effectively separate both light and heavy oil/water mixtures up to 20 repeated cycles. The coated mesh possessed high photocatalytic activity for the methylene blue (MB) degradation (94.5%) within 240 min under UV-A light. The modified mesh designed in this study exhibited great prospect and potential in industrial applications.
