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Effective ion sieving with Ti3C2Tx MXene membranes for production of drinking water from seawater

Nature Sustainability volume 3, pages 296–302 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Traditional ways of producing drinking water from groundwater, water recycling and water conservation are not sufficient. Seawater desalination would close the gap but the main technology used is thermally driven multi-flash distillation, which is energy consuming and not sustainable. Stacking two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials into lamellar membranes is a promising technique in the pursuit of both high selectivity and permeance in water desalination. However, 2D membranes tend to swell in water, and increasing their stability in aqueous solution is still challenging. Here, we report non-swelling, MXene membranes prepared by the intercalation of Al3+ ions. Swelling is prevented by strong interactions between Al3+ and oxygen functional groups terminating at the MXene surface. These membranes show excellent non-swelling stability in aqueous solutions up to 400 h and possess high rejection of NaCl (~89.5–99.6%) with fast water fluxes (~1.1–8.5 l m−2 h−1). Such membranes can be easily fabricated by simple filtration and ion-intercalating methods, which holds promise for their scalability.

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Fig. 1: Characterizations and d-spacings of untreated MXMs and Al3+-intercalated MXMs.
Fig. 2: Ion permeation tests through untreated MXMs and Al3+-intercalated MXMs.
Fig. 3: DFT and MD simulations of ion permeation.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on request. Source data for Figs. 1–3 and Extended Data Figs. 1–3 are provided with the paper.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Natural Science Foundation of China (21536005, 51621001, 21506066, 21606086 and 21861132013), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019TQ0101, 2019M662920), NSFC-DFG (GZ-678), the Natural Science Foundation of the Guangdong Province (2014A030312007) and Guangdong Natural Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar (2017A030306002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Li Ding, Libo Li, Yanchang Liu, Yi Wu, Zong Lu, Junjie Deng, Yanying Wei & Haihui Wang

  2. Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Jürgen Caro

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  1. Li Ding
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Contributions

L.D., Y.Wei, H.W. and J.C. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. L.D. synthesized the materials and carried out most of the characterizations. Y.Wu, Z.L. and J.D. helped with some of the characterizations. L.D. contributed to the DFT calculations. L.D., L.L. and Y.L. contributed to the MD simulations. L.D., L.L., Y.Wei, H.W. and J.C. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yanying Wei, Jürgen Caro or Haihui Wang.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 XPS spectra of the MXMs.

The XPS spectra of untreated MXM and Al3+-intercalated MXM. a, Survey spectra of untreated MXM and Al3+-intercalated MXM. b, High-resolution XPS spectra of untreated MXM in Al 2p region. There was no peak in Al 2p region, indicating the nonexistence of Al in untreated MXM. c, High-resolution XPS spectra of Al3+-intercalated MXM in Al 2p region. In the Al 2p region, the fitted peak in the Al3+-intercalated MXM located at 74.8 eV binding energy in Al 2p region corresponds to an Al-O bond, indicating that Al ions tend to connect with oxygen groups on surface of MXene nanosheet.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Cycles performance of the Al3+-intercalated MXMs.

Cycles of desalination/drying performance of the Al3+-intercalated MXMs. a, Na+ permeation rate of each cycle. b, XRD results and the d-spacings for the Al3+-intercalated MXMs in the dry state and after cycles of desalination/drying. It can be found that the Na+ permeation rates of Al3+-intercalated MXM almost maintained in the same level during the cycle operation. And the corresponding XRD analysis also shows the stable interlayer spacing of the Al3+-intercalated MXMs even after three cycles of desalination/drying, demonstrating that there was no significant swelling of the membrane once exposed to water again.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 Permeation rates of MXMs under different feed concentrations.

Permeation rates of Na+ through Al3+-intercalated MXMs. a, With various feed concentrations (NaCl as the salt solution). b, Salt rejection of 1.1-μm-thick membrane against NaCl concentration. c, Under a real-time changing of feed concentration. The concentration of NaCl in the feed side was first increased from 0.2 M to 2 M with a certain interval of time (5h), and then decreased to 0.2 M, the permeation rates still could come back to the initial state, showing an excellent non-swelling stability of Al3+-intercalated MXMs. It can be seen that the Na+ permeation rates through the Al3+-intercalated MXMs increased linearly rather than exponentially with increasing the salt concentration on the feed side, demonstrating that the Al3+-intercalated MXM could withstand the high driving force generated under a high salt concentration and exhibit good structure stability. Error bars indicate the standard deviation from three different samples.

Source data

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–32, Notes 1–4 and Tables 1–8.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Unmodified SEM and TEM images and experimental source data.

Source Data Fig. 2

Experimental source data.

Source Data Fig. 3

Simulation source data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

Experimental source data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

Experimental source data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 3

Experimental source data.

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Ding, L., Li, L., Liu, Y. et al. Effective ion sieving with Ti3C2Tx MXene membranes for production of drinking water from seawater. Nat Sustain 3, 296–302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0474-0

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