Pyro-layered heterostructured nanosheet membrane for hydrogen separation

Ruoxin Wang; Jianhao Qian; Xiaofang Chen; Ze-Xian Low; Yu Chen; Hongyu Ma; Heng-An Wu; Cara M Doherty; Durga Acharya; Zongli Xie; Matthew R Hill; Wei Shen; Fengchao Wang; Huanting Wang

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37932-9

Pyro-layered heterostructured nanosheet membrane for hydrogen separation

Nat Commun. 2023 Apr 15;14(1):2161. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-37932-9.

Authors

Ruoxin Wang^#¹, Jianhao Qian^#², Xiaofang Chen^{1

3}, Ze-Xian Low^{4

5}, Yu Chen⁶, Hongyu Ma¹, Heng-An Wu², Cara M Doherty⁷, Durga Acharya⁷, Zongli Xie⁷, Matthew R Hill^{1

7}, Wei Shen¹, Fengchao Wang⁸, Huanting Wang⁹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia.
² CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, Department of Modern Mechanics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China.
³ School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China.
⁴ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia. nicholas.low@monash.edu.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, National Engineering Research Center for Special Separation Membrane, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 210009, China. nicholas.low@monash.edu.
⁶ Monash Center for Electron Microscopy, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia.
⁷ CSIRO Manufacturing, Private Bag 10, Clayton South, Victoria, 3169, Australia.
⁸ CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, Department of Modern Mechanics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China. wangfc@ustc.edu.cn.
⁹ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia. huanting.wang@monash.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Engineering different two-dimensional materials into heterostructured membranes with unique physiochemical properties and molecular sieving channels offers an effective way to design membranes for fast and selective gas molecule transport. Here we develop a simple and versatile pyro-layering approach to fabricate heterostructured membranes from boron nitride nanosheets as the main scaffold and graphene nanosheets derived from a chitosan precursor as the filler. The rearrangement of the graphene nanosheets adjoining the boron nitride nanosheets during the pyro-layering treatment forms precise in-plane slit-like nanochannels and a plane-to-plane spacing of ~3.0 Å, thereby endowing specific gas transport pathways for selective hydrogen transport. The heterostructured membrane shows a high H₂ permeability of 849 Barrer, with a H₂/CO₂ selectivity of 290. This facile and scalable technique holds great promise for the fabrication of heterostructures as next-generation membranes for enhancing the efficiency of gas separation and purification processes.