Membranes with special wettability (superhydrophobic/superoleophilic or superhydrophilic/superoleophobic) had been introduced to separate oil/water emulsions. Nevertheless, the surface or pore canals of membrane easily fouled by oily wastewater are the tough challenges towards longtime application. In this work, a PVDF@PDA@ZnO membrane was firstly fabricated via growth of ZnO nanoparticles from ZnO seeds planted on the PVDF@PDA membrane. This PVDF@PDA@ZnO membrane showed good separation capability for various emulsions (which the separation efficiencies and fluxes were up to 99.1% and 654 L m ^− 2 h ^− 1, respectively). The degradation rate of MB solution treated by the composite membrane was almost 100% attributing to the excellent photocatalytic ability of ZnO. Moreover, the composite membrane could maintain high efficiency (above 99.27%) after long-time emulsions separation/UV-light irradiation, which displayed superior UV-driven self-cleaning and oxidation resistance performance. This self-cleanable composite membrane possessed durability and held high promise for long-time oil/water emulsions separation.

已经引入具有特殊润湿性的膜（超疏水/超亲油或超亲水/超疏油）来分离油/水乳液。然而，容易被含油废水污染的膜的表面或孔道是长期应用的严峻挑战。在这项工作中，首先通过种植在PVDF @ PDA膜上的ZnO种子通过ZnO纳米颗粒的生长来制造PVDF @ PDA @ ZnO膜。这种PVDF @ PDA @ ZnO膜对各种乳液显示出良好的分离能力（分离效率和通量分别高达99.1％和654 L m  ^{-  2} h  ^{-  1}， 分别）。复合膜处理的MB溶液的降解率几乎为100％，这归因于ZnO的优异的光催化能力。而且，经过长时间的乳液分离/紫外光照射后，复合膜可以保持较高的效率（99.27％以上），显示出优异的紫外驱动自清洁和抗氧化性能。这种可自我清洁的复合膜具有耐用性，并有望长期分离油/水乳液。