Highly stable graphene-oxide-based membranes with superior permeability

Nature Communications - Tập 9 Số 1
Khalid Hussain Thebo1, Xitang Qian1, Qing Zhang1, Long Chen1, Hui‐Ming Cheng1, Wencai Ren1
1Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang 110016, China

Tóm tắt

AbstractIncreasing fresh water demand for drinking and agriculture is one of the grand challenges of our age. Graphene oxide (GO) membranes have shown a great potential for desalination and water purification. However, it is challenging to further improve the water permeability without sacrificing the separation efficiency, and the GO membranes are easily delaminated in aqueous solutions within few hours. Here, we report a class of reduced GO membranes with enlarged interlayer distance fabricated by using theanine amino acid and tannic acid as reducing agent and cross-linker. Such membranes show water permeance over 10,000 L m−2 h−1 bar−1, which is 10–1000 times higher than those of previously reported GO-based membranes and commercial membranes, and good separation efficiency, e.g., rhodamine B and methylene blue rejection of ~100%. Moreover, they show no damage or delamination in water, acid, and basic solutions even after months.

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