Journal
NATURE NANOTECHNOLOGY
Volume 10, Issue 5, Pages 459-464Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NNANO.2015.37
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Funding
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- US Department of Energy
- ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS)
- US Department of Energy, Office of Science User Facility
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By creating nanoscale pores in a layer of graphene, it could be used as an effective separation membrane due to its chemical and mechanical stability, its flexibility and, most importantly, its one-atom thickness. Theoretical studies have indicated that the performance of such membranes should be superior to state-of-the-art polymer-based filtration membranes, and experimental studies have recently begun to explore their potential. Here, we show that single-layer porous graphene can be used as a desalination membrane. Nanometre-sized pores are created in a graphene monolayer using an oxygen plasma etching process, which allows the size of the pores to be tuned. The resulting membranes exhibit a salt rejection rate of nearly 100% and rapid water transport. In particular, water fluxes of up to 10(6) g m(-2) s(-1) at 40 degrees C were measured using pressure difference as a driving force, while water fluxes measured using osmotic pressure as a driving force did not exceed 70 g m(-2) s(-1) atm(-1).
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