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Reply to: Random interstratification in hydrated graphene oxide membranes and implications for seawater desalination

Nature Nanotechnology volume 17, pages 134–135 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 20 January 2022

replying to A. Talyzin et al. Nature Nanotechnology https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-01066-0 (2022)

Talyzin’s comment1 raises several points about the interpretation of the experimental results presented in our article2, but these do not affect any of our main conclusions. The main criticism is pointed at our analysis of the X-ray diffraction (XRD) data used to estimate changes in the separation between graphene oxide (GO) sheets after the exposure of GO membranes to humidity. Talyzin suggests that the resulting GO membranes had both hydrated and dry layers, and the interlayer spacing observed using XRD was their average1. We disagree. Our diffraction data showed a systematic shift in the X-ray peak positions on the membranes’ exposure to different levels of humidity. This behaviour would be difficult to rationalize within Talyzin’s model of two types of GO regions. Indeed, we did not observe a convolution of two XRD peaks that came from dry and hydrated regions. However, the proximity of many unresolved peaks should cause one broadened XRD peak, and this is what we found experimentally. A distribution of the interlayer spacing in this case can qualitatively be estimated from the width of the resulting peak. Next, Talyzin uses his model above to speculate that the observed changes in ion permeation are due to varying relative proportions of the dry and hydrated channels1. This is inconsistent with the other observations provided in our article, which show that water permeation through differently hydrated GO membranes changes only marginally, whereas ion permeation rates exhibit exponential changes. Therefore, Talyzin’s model is not valid for our experiments2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Graphene Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Jijo Abraham, Kalangi S. Vasu, Yang Su, Christie T. Cherian & Rahul R. Nair

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Jijo Abraham, Kalangi S. Vasu, Christopher D. Williams, Yang Su, Christie T. Cherian, James Dix, Paola Carbone & Rahul R. Nair

  3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Kalon Gopinadhan, Irina V. Grigorieva & Andre K. Geim

  4. Department of Materials, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Eric Prestat & Sarah J. Haigh

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Correspondence to Rahul R. Nair.

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Abraham, J., Vasu, K.S., Williams, C.D. et al. Reply to: Random interstratification in hydrated graphene oxide membranes and implications for seawater desalination. Nat. Nanotechnol. 17, 134–135 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-01067-z

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