posted on 2021-04-13, 18:40authored byZhiyang Zeng, Ruiyang Song, Shengping Zhang, Xiao Han, Zhen Zhu, Xiaobo Chen, Luda Wang
Proton exchange membranes (PEMs)
with both high selectivity and
high permeance are of great demand in hydrogen-based applications,
especially in fuel cells. Although graphene membranes have shown high
selectivity of protons over other ions and molecules, the relatively
low permeance of protons through perfect pristine graphene restricts
its practical applications. Inspired by the nitrogen-assisted proton
transport in biological systems, we introduced N-doping to increase
the proton permeance and proposed a type of N-doped graphene membranes
(NGMs) for proton exchange, which have both high proton permeance
and high selectivity. Compared to the state-of-the-art commercial
PEMs, the NGMs show significant increases in both areal proton conductivity
(2–3 orders of magnitude) and selectivity of proton to methanol
(1–2 orders of magnitude). The work realized the controllable
tuning of proton permeance of the graphene membrane with N-doping
and developed a new type of graphene-based PEMs with high performance
for practical applications.