Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a disruptive material platform for various novel applications including nanofiltration for water purification due to their excellent physicochemical features. Nevertheless, the currently available approaches for preparing COF membranes need stringent synthesis conditions, prolonged fabrication time, and tedious post-processing, leading to poor productivity. Herein, a simple and efficient layer-by-layer stacking assembly strategy is developed based on electrophoretic deposition (EPD) to rapidly generate ionic COF membranes due to the uniform driving force for nanosheet assembly. A new two-cell EPD design avoids the usual EPD problems such as bubbles and acidic/alkaline microenvironments in the near-electrode region in aqueous EPD processes. Ultrathin COF membranes with homogenous structures can be produced within several minutes. Consequently, the prepared COF membranes exhibit outstanding permselectivity and possess good stability and anti-pressure ability due to their uniform architecture and unique chemical composition.
Keywords: electrophoretic deposition; ionic covalent organic frameworks; membrane separation; molecular separation; nanosheets.
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