nl0c04512_si_001.pdf (1.25 MB)
Highly Conductive and Permeable Nanocomposite Ultrafiltration Membranes Using Laser-Reduced Graphene Oxide
journal contribution
posted on 2021-03-09, 18:38 authored by Anthony P. Straub, David S. Bergsman, Bezawit A. Getachew, Liam M. Leahy, Jatin J. Patil, Nicola Ferralis, Jeffrey C. GrossmanElectrically conductive membranes
are a promising avenue to reduce
water treatment costs due to their ability to minimize the detrimental
impact of fouling, to degrade contaminants, and to provide other additional
benefits during filtration. Here, we demonstrate the facile and low-cost
fabrication of electrically conductive membranes using laser-reduced
graphene oxide (GO). In this method, GO is filtered onto a poly(ether
sulfone) membrane support before being pyrolyzed via laser into a
conductive film. Laser-reduced GO composite membranes are shown to
be equally as permeable to water as the underlying membrane support
and possess sheet resistances as low as 209 Ω/□. Application
of the laser-reduced GO membranes is demonstrated through greater
than 97% removal of a surrogate water contaminant, 25 μM methyl
orange dye, with an 8 V applied potential. Furthermore, we show that
laser-reduced GO membranes can be further tuned with the addition
of p-phenylenediamine binding molecules to decrease
the sheet resistance to 54 Ω/□.