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MXene molecular sieving membranes for highly efficient gas separation
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

MXene molecular sieving membranes for highly efficient gas separation

Li Ding, Yanying Wei, Libo Li, Tao Zhang, Haihui Wang, Jian Xue, Liang-Xin Ding, Suqing Wang, Jürgen Caro and Yury Gogotsi
Nature communications, v 9(1), pp 155-155
01 Dec 2018
PMID: 29323113
url
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02529-6View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

ESI Highly Cited Paper (Incites)
Molecular sieving membranes with sufficient and uniform nanochannels that break the permeability-selectivity trade-off are desirable for energy-efficient gas separation, and the arising two-dimensional (2D) materials provide new routes for membrane development. However, for 2D lamellar membranes, disordered interlayer nanochannels for mass transport are usually formed between randomly stacked neighboring nanosheets, which is obstructive for highly efficient separation. Therefore, manufacturing lamellar membranes with highly ordered nanochannel structures for fast and precise molecular sieving is still challenging. Here, we report on lamellar stacked MXene membranes with aligned and regular subnanometer channels, taking advantage of the abundant surface-terminating groups on the MXene nanosheets, which exhibit excellent gas separation performance with H 2 permeability >2200 Barrer and H 2 /CO 2 selectivity >160, superior to the state-of-the-art membranes. The results of molecular dynamics simulations quantitatively support the experiments, confirming the subnanometer interlayer spacing between the neighboring MXene nanosheets as molecular sieving channels for gas separation. Two-dimensional materials show great potential for membrane technologies, but their disordered channels hinder their molecular sieving performance. Here, Wang, Gogotsi and colleagues design a MXene membrane with ordered nanochannels that exhibits an excellent H 2 /CO 2 gas separation performance.

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Web of Science research areas
Chemistry, Physical
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