The recent drought in California and worldwide water scarcity have highlighted the very importance of treating unconventional waters for improving the life quality of people living in water stressed areas.  The membrane process is among the most powerful strategies toward this goal.  Recently, graphene oxide (GO) has emerged as a two-dimensional nanomaterial with exceptional morphological, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and biological properties that allow GO to be used as building blocks to form multifunctional membranes for water purification and wastewater reuse.  Some exciting results from our ongoing research on GO membranes made by layer-stacking and bonding of GO nanosheets will be presented. Compared with today’s widely used polymeric membranes, GO membranes exhibit very interesting properties such as high water permeability, excellent selectivity, and amenable functional groups. More importantly, our membrane performance experiments demonstrate unique membrane selectivity, i.e., high rejection of uncharged organic molecules and low rejection of ionic species with similar hydraulic radius, which is opposite to what we normally observed with polymeric membranes.  Such unique behavior of GO membranes could lead to enhanced removal of neutral organic contaminants, such as pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting compounds in wastewater reuse scenario.<br/>

Potential of graphene membranes for enhanced removal neutral organic compounds

251st National Meeting (2016)

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