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Graphene oxide nanofiltration membranes for desalination under realistic conditions

Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages 402–408 (2021)Cite this article

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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.

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Fig. 1: Characteristics of the GO–TBO membranes.
Fig. 2: Schematic microstructures of GO–TBO membranes.
Fig. 3: Rejections of the GO–TBO membranes.

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Data availability

The data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information files. Raw instrumental characterization data (X-ray diffraction, UV-vis and fluorescence spectra) are shown graphically. The numerical versions of these data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the following individuals at Georgia Tech: E. Reichmanis and Y. Deng for instrumentation access; N. Hooshmand, A. Korde and S. Liang for useful discussions. We acknowledge financial support by the DOE-RAPID Institute (#DE-EE0007888-7-5) and an industrial consortium comprising Georgia-Pacific, International Paper, SAPPI and WestRock. Z.W. acknowledges the additional support from the Georgia Tech Renewable Bioproducts Institute for a PhD Fellowship. XRD, XPS and SEM characterizations were performed at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, home to one of the 16 sites of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant no. ECCS-1542174).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Zhongzhen Wang, Chen Ma & Sankar Nair

  2. Renewable Bioproducts Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Zhongzhen Wang, Chen Ma, Scott A. Sinquefield, Meisha L. Shofner & Sankar Nair

  3. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Chunyan Xu

  4. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Meisha L. Shofner

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Contributions

S.N., Z.W. and M.L.S. conceived this work. Z.W., C.M., S.A.S. and C.X. designed and conducted synthesis, structure characterization and membrane coupon permeation experiments. C.M. and S.A.S. performed membrane size scale-up and crossflow measurements. All authors participated in the interpretation of data and in writing of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sankar Nair.

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Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Juergen Caro and Yanying Wei for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–17 and Tables 1–5.

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Wang, Z., Ma, C., Xu, C. et al. Graphene oxide nanofiltration membranes for desalination under realistic conditions. Nat Sustain 4, 402–408 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00674-3

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