title: Atomistic understandings of reduced graphene oxide as an ultrathin-film nanoporous membrane for separations.
abstract: The intrinsic defects in reduced graphene oxide (rGO) formed during reduction processes can act as nanopores, making rGO a promising ultrathin-film membrane candidate for separations. To assess the potential of rGO for such applications, molecular dynamics techniques are employed to understand the defect formation in rGO and their separation performance in water desalination and natural gas purification. We establish the relationship between rGO synthesis parameters and defect sizes, resulting in a potential means to control the size of nanopores in rGO. Furthermore, our results show that rGO membranes obtained under properly chosen synthesis conditions can achieve effective separations and provide significantly higher permeate fluxes than currently available membranes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.|Department of Process and Energy, Delft University of Technology, Leeghwaterstraat 39, 2628 CB Delft, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Li-Chiang
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Grossman