Overcoming the permeability-selectivity challenge in water purification using two-dimensional cobalt-functionalized vermiculite membrane

Mengtao Tian, Yi Liu, Shaoze Zhang, Can Yu, Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov and Zhenghua Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Mengtao Tian: Membrane & Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment Center, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center for Urban Water Recycling and Environmental Safety, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University
Yi Liu: Membrane & Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment Center, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center for Urban Water Recycling and Environmental Safety, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University
Shaoze Zhang: National Engineering Laboratory for Vacuum Metallurgy, Kunming University of Science and Technology
Can Yu: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov: Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Zhenghua Zhang: Membrane & Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment Center, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Research Center for Urban Water Recycling and Environmental Safety, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Clean water and sanitation are major global challenges highlighted by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Water treatment using energy-efficient membrane technologies is one of the most promising solutions. Despite decades of research, the membrane permeability-selectivity trade-off remains the major challenge for synthetic membranes. To overcome this challenge, here we develop a two-dimensional cobalt-functionalized vermiculite membrane (Co@VMT), which innovatively combines the properties of membrane filtration and nanoconfinement catalysis. The Co@VMT membrane demonstrates a high water permeance of 122.4 L·m−2·h−1·bar−1, which is two orders of magnitude higher than that of the VMT membrane (1.1 L·m−2·h−1·bar−1). Moreover, the Co@VMT membrane is applied as a nanofluidic advanced oxidation process platform to activate peroxymonosulfate (PMS) for degradation of several organic pollutants (dyes, pharmaceuticals, and phenols) and shows excellent degradation performance (~100%) and stability (for over 107 h) even in real-world water matrices. Importantly, safe and non-toxic effluent water quality is ensured by the Co@VMT membrane/PMS system without brine, which is totally different from the molecular sieving-based VMT membrane with the concentrated pollutants remaining in the brine. This work can serve as a generic design blueprint for the development of diverse nanofluidic catalytic membranes to overcome the persistent membrane permeability-selectivity issue in water purification.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44699-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-44699-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-44699-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().