Synthesis and characterization of semi-permeable graphene/graphene oxide membranes for water desalination

Abstract

In this paper, we present novel semi-permeable graphene-based membranes. Composite filters were designed and fabricated on polysulfone porous scaffolding using combinations of polycrystalline large-area High Strength Metallurgical Graphene (HSMG®), graphene oxide, hydrazine and an in-situ interfacial polymerized polyamide. The naturally occurring defects in HSMG® (which were tenths of a nanometer) were the clue in fabricating a filtering membrane. The performance of graphene membranes was evaluated in forward osmosis test. The prepared composites were proved to be semi-permeable membranes with great ions blocking efficiency (over 95%) and water flux only one order of magnitude lower than the commercial reverse osmosis membranes. The experiments’ results demonstrated that the solutions proposed in this work indicate that graphene-based membranes can be used in water treatment technology.