Abstract

Graphene-based membranes demonstrating ultrafast water transport, precise molecular sieving of gas and solvated molecules shows great promise as novel separation platforms; however, scale-up of these membranes to large-areas remains an unresolved problem. Here we demonstrate that the discotic nematic phase of graphene oxide (GO) can be shear aligned to form highly ordered, continuous, thin films of multi-layered GO on a support membrane by an industrially adaptable method to produce large-area membranes (13 × 14 cm2) in < 5 s. Pressure driven transport data demonstrate high retention (> 90%) for charged and uncharged organic probe molecules with a hydrated radius above 5 Å as well as modest (30–40%) retention of monovalent and divalent salts. The highly ordered graphene sheets in the plane of the membrane make organized channels and enhance the permeability (71±5 l m−2 hr−1 bar−1 for 150±15 nm thick membranes).

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-7-2016

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Nature Communications, v. 7, article no. 10891, p. 1-12.

© The Author(s) 2017

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10891

Funding Information

We acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council through an ARC Discovery (DP 110100082), ARC Linkage (LP 140100959) grant and also partial support from University of Kentucky NSF EPSCoR grant.

ncomms10891-s1.pdf (718 kB)
Supplementary Information: Supplementary Figures 1-7, Supplementary Tables 1-4, Supplementary Notes 1-2 and Supplementary References.

ncomms10891-s2.mov (4811 kB)
Supplementary Movie 1: Large-scale production of graphene based membrane

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