Seo Dong Han, Pineda Shafique, Woo Yun Chul, Xie Ming, Murdock Adrian T, Ang Elisa Y M, Jiao Yalong, Park Myoung Jun, Lim Sung Il, Lawn Malcolm, Borghi Fabricio Frizera, Han Zhao Jun, Gray Stephen, Millar Graeme, Du Aijun, Shon Ho Kyong, Ng Teng Yong, Ostrikov Kostya Ken
CSIRO Manufacturing, 36 Bradfield Road, Lindfield, NSW, 2070, Australia.
School of Physics, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
Nat Commun. 2018 Feb 14;9(1):683. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-02871-3.
The inability of membranes to handle a wide spectrum of pollutants is an important unsolved problem for water treatment. Here we demonstrate water desalination via a membrane distillation process using a graphene membrane where water permeation is enabled by nanochannels of multilayer, mismatched, partially overlapping graphene grains. Graphene films derived from renewable oil exhibit significantly superior retention of water vapour flux and salt rejection rates, and a superior antifouling capability under a mixture of saline water containing contaminants such as oils and surfactants, compared to commercial distillation membranes. Moreover, real-world applicability of our membrane is demonstrated by processing sea water from Sydney Harbour over 72 h with macroscale membrane size of 4 cm, processing ~0.5 L per day. Numerical simulations show that the channels between the mismatched grains serve as an effective water permeation route. Our research will pave the way for large-scale graphene-based antifouling membranes for diverse water treatment applications.
对于水处理而言，膜无法处理多种污染物是一个重要的未解决问题。在此，我们展示了一种通过膜蒸馏过程进行水脱盐的方法，该过程使用了一种石墨烯膜，其中多层、不匹配且部分重叠的石墨烯颗粒的纳米通道实现了水的渗透。与商业蒸馏膜相比，源自可再生油的石墨烯膜在含有油和表面活性剂等污染物的盐水混合物中，表现出显著更优异的水蒸气通量保留率和盐截留率，以及卓越的抗污染能力。此外，我们通过使用尺寸为4厘米的宏观尺度膜，对悉尼港海水进行了72小时的处理，每天处理约0.5升，证明了我们的膜在实际应用中的可行性。数值模拟表明，不匹配颗粒之间的通道是有效的水渗透途径。我们的研究将为用于各种水处理应用的大规模石墨烯基抗污染膜铺平道路。
