Membrane separation technology has been widely explored in desalination and CO₂ capture applications due to its advantages, such as low energy consumption, space saving, and so on. Polyamide composite membranes fabricated via interfacial polymerization process have attracted significant attention owing to its facile scale-up and cost-efficiency. Control of surface morphology and structure of polyamide membranes is of great importance in dictating the separation performance.

Interfacial polymerization is a reaction-diffusion process, which in critically influenced by the diffusion of activator and inhibitor. Aa a result of the difficulty in tailoring the diffusion of monomers, it is challenging to regulate the selective layer thickness and structure of polyamide membranes.

A research team led by Prof. JIANG Heqing from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) constructed an ultrathin graphene oxide (GO) interlayer on polyethersulfone macroporous substrate to tailor the structure of polyamide composite membrane, and thus improve the desalination performance. 

Recently, this team directly introduced Zr-based metal organic framework into aqueous amine phase, taking advantage of the strong interaction between Zr metal centre and amine monomer to lower amine diffusion, thus generating polyamide membranes with a specific nanoscale striped Turing structure and a selective layer thickness of 145 nm. The resulting membrane exhibited a higher CO₂/CH₄ selectivity of 58 and a CO₂ permeance of 27 GPU, showing a promising application in CO₂ capture and biogas upgrading. The related findings were published in ACS Applied Materials & Interface.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the QIBEBT and Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy (DNL), CAS.

 A Scheme for the synthetic reaction for polyamide membrane with a homogeneous nanoscale striped Turing structure. (Image by JIAO Chengli)

Contact:

CHENG Jing

Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Tel: 86-532-80662647/80662622

E-mail: chengjing@qibebt.ac.cn