Proceedings of nanoGe September Meeting 2017 (NFM17)
Publication date: 20th June 2016
Membranes with high permeability and selectivity are desired for energy-efficient liquid separation. In this work, a highly wrinkled surface and ultrafast water transport channels centered in a polyamide membrane were prepared by in-situ embedding graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets into the separation layer of a nanofiltration (NF) membrane via an interfacial polymerization. The wrinkled morphology was achieved by adjusting the GO lateral size and additive content of GO. The distribution of GO nanosheets in the composite membrane was revealed at a low magnification with TEM, and GO nanosheets were well confined right in the middle of the sub-20 nm ultrathin polyamide membrane. The incorporation of GO also improved the hydrophilicity of the composite membrane. The rough and hydrophilic surface enabled the attraction of large amounts of water molecules to the membrane, and the sub-20nm membrane thickness and two-dimension capillary network formed by the stacked GO nanosheets accelerated the transport of water molecules through the membrane. Consequently, this wrinkled and sandwich structured ultrathin NF composite membrane overcame the trade-off between flux and retention of commercial membranes, and gave an unprecedented water flux up to 258 LMH/MPa and a high salt rejection to MgSO4 over 90% simultaneously, which were five-fold higher than those of commercial NF membranes. Moreover, to achieve a certain separation performance, the composite membrane requires a much lower operation pressure. Our work provides a novel strategy to break the bottleneck of traditional polymeric NF membranes with a strikingly decreased energy consumption, and bring the notable advantages of GO, the most promising candidate for water purification, closer to practical applications.
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