Abstract
Water quality pollution and the shortage of freshwater resources is a serious problem facing society today, and desalination technology based on membrane separation reverse osmosis has received significant attention. Recently, the development of nanoporous materials with homogeneous and customizable pore structures offers substantial potential for substance separation applications. However, conventional polymeric reverse osmosis membranes are still bottlenecked in equilibrating permeability and selectivity due to the constraints of transport resistance and irregular pore structure. Herein, a two-dimensional (2D) nanoporous graphene-like structure (Flme-C) is evaluated to examine its desalination applications and physicochemical properties by molecular dynamics (MD) and density functional theory (DFT). The multiporous structure periodically distributed on the membrane surface endows Flme-C with a large number of salt ion adsorption sites while effectively relieving the stresses exerted by seawater. In addition, the Flme-C desalination membrane exhibited a salt ion selectivity of 98.96% and an ultra-high water permeability of 126.75 L·cm− 2·day− 1·MPa− 1. In particular, Flme-C features the interconnected electronic structures to display intrinsic metallicity, which supports the release of salt ions from the membrane surface for self-cleaning as the reverse voltage is applied. In summary, these results confirm that 2D nanoporous carbon-based materials bear a huge potential to perform in seawater desalination and actively promote the advancement of a sustainable generation for seawater desalination membranes.