title: Reverse osmosis desalination of chitosan cross-linked graphene oxide/titania hybrid lamellar membranes.
abstract: With excellent mass transport properties, graphene oxide (GO)-based lamellar membranes are believed to have great potential in water desalination. In order to quantify whether GO-based membranes are indeed suitable for reverse osmosis (RO) desalination, three sub-micrometer thick GO-based lamellar membranes: GO-only, reduced GO (RGO)/titania (TO) nanosheets and RGO/TO/chitosan (CTS) are prepared, and their RO desalination performances are evaluated in a home-made RO test apparatus. The photoreduction of GO by TO improves the salt rejection, which increases slowly with the membrane thickness. The RGO/TO/CTS hybrid membranes exhibit higher rejection rates of only about 30% (greater than threefold improvement compared with a GO-only membrane) which is still inferior compared to other commercial RO membranes. The low rejection rates mainly arise from the pressure-induced weakening of the ion-GO interlayer interactions. Despite the advantages of simple, low-cost preparation, high permeability and selectivity of GO-based lamellar membranes, as the current desalination performances are not high enough to afford practical application, there still remains a great challenge to realize high performance separation membranes for water desalination applications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450052, People's Republic of China. State Key Lab of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, and Key Lab of Advanced Materials (MOE), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.forename: Penzhan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Yingjiu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Hongwei
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhu