Recent Advances in Graphene Oxide Membranes for Water desalination

Abstract

Freshwater is one of the most important sources in daily life. However, freshwater resources are very scarce at present. As a consequence, water desalination remains an important challenge in solving the problem of the shortage of freshwater resources. As an effective technique, membrane-based desalination has been developed to be a mature solution to solve the problem of water desalination. Graphene oxide membranes have been considered important membrane materials for water desalination due to their high stability and high hydrophilicity. In such review, this paper will introduce three kinds of recently-developed graphene oxide membranes for water desalination, which respectively are mixed matrix membrane, reduced nanoporous graphene oxide membrane, and GO/C60 membrane. Firstly, the structure and characteristics of each membrane are introduced; then, the processes of how to make these membranes are described. Additionally, this study compares them with other novel methods for water desalination. In the end, on the basis of graphene oxide membranes, it could be seen that these three membranes are more promising.