Graphene oxide nanofiltration membranes for desalination under realistic conditions

Zhongzhen Wang, Chen Ma, Chunyan Xu, Scott A. Sinquefield, Meisha L. Shofner and Sankar Nair ()
Additional contact information
Zhongzhen Wang: Georgia Institute of Technology
Chen Ma: Georgia Institute of Technology
Chunyan Xu: Georgia Institute of Technology
Scott A. Sinquefield: Georgia Institute of Technology
Meisha L. Shofner: Georgia Institute of Technology
Sankar Nair: Georgia Institute of Technology

Nature Sustainability, 2021, vol. 4, issue 5, 402-408

Abstract: Abstract The demands of clean water production and wastewater recycling continue to drive nanofiltration membrane development. Graphene oxide (GO) membranes have exhibited the potential to revolutionize nanofiltration, but sustaining high solute rejections at realistic concentrations remains a major challenge. Here we show that a series of membranes based on GO bound to polycyclic π-conjugated cations such as toluidine blue O show substantially enhanced rejections for salts and neutral solutes over a wide concentration range. The observed solute rejection behaviours in these π-intercalated GO membranes can be understood by a dual mechanism of interlayer spacing modulation and creation of diffusion barriers in the two-dimensional interlayer galleries. These membranes are easily scalable and possess good chemical and mechanical robustness in desalination of a multicomponent industrial stream at elevated pH, temperature, stream velocity and solids content.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00674-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:natsus:v:4:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1038_s41893-020-00674-3

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-00674-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

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