Abstract
The rational design of high-performance desalination membranes is critical to enable sustainable water treatment applications. However, conventional polymeric membranes suffer from insufficient stability especially under harsh chemical conditions. Here we show a novel robust ceramic-based UiO-66 metal–organic framework nanoporous membrane molecularly engineered with missing linkers, enabling more challenging chemically harsh desalination applications. The membranes show competitive desalination performance, which is higher than most state-of-the-art asymmetric and thin-film composite polymeric osmotic membranes. Experimental and molecular simulation results indicate that introducing missing-linker defects substantially increases water flux, allowing faster transport of water clusters with a lower energy barrier via enlarging the pore size of metal–organic framework nanochannels. Notably, the UiO-66 membranes exhibit exceptional stability compared with polymeric membranes under high oxidizing (chlorine) and alkaline conditions and promising application potential in industrial wastewater treatment. Our work provides a new rational design of robust high-performance desalination membranes for expanded water treatment applications that are not feasible by conventional polymeric membranes.
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Data availability
All data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.
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All simulation codes are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)-Research Grants Council (RGC) Joint Program (number 52261160381, Y.D.) and NSFC General Program (number 52070033, Y.D.). The work is also partially supported by the NSFC-RGC Joint Research Scheme (project number N_HKU721/22, C.T.) from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, China. We also would like to express our sincere appreciations to USTC, DUT and CUHK for support.
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H.-Q.Y., M.E. and Y.D. supervised this project. Y.D. made the idea and contributions. Q.L. and L.-C.L. performed the computational simulations. Y.H. performed the low-dose TEM experiments. Y.D. wrote the manuscript. M.E., H.-Q.Y. and Y.D. revised the manuscript. Q.L., C.V., C.T. and B.L. made some important contributions to this work. All authors approved the manuscript.
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Dong, Y., Lyu, Q., Lin, LC. et al. Ultrastable ceramic-based metal–organic framework membranes with missing linkers for robust desalination. Nat Water (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00218-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00218-5