Graphene oxide membrane chemically modified by electron-transfer diazonium chemistry for efficient dye separation

Zhenjiang Li; Yucheng Xing; Yan Liu; Alan Meng; Xiaoyan Fan

doi:10.1039/d2ra03886b

Graphene oxide membrane chemically modified by electron-transfer diazonium chemistry for efficient dye separation

RSC Adv. 2022 Oct 19;12(46):29878-29883. doi: 10.1039/d2ra03886b. eCollection 2022 Oct 17.

Authors

Zhenjiang Li¹, Yucheng Xing¹, Yan Liu², Alan Meng³, Xiaoyan Fan²

Affiliations

¹ College of Materials Science and Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology Qingdao 266061 Shandong P. R. China.
² School of Mathematics and Physics, Qingdao University of Science and Technology Qingdao 266061 Shandong P. R. China lzfxy@126.com.
³ College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology Qingdao 266061 Shandong P. R. China.

Abstract

By chemical modification of the graphene oxide (GO) surface via diazonium chemistry, we introduce nitrobenzene groups as new interlayer pillars to GO memebranes like the surface oxygen-containing functional groups. The larger pillar can finely enlarge the interlayer space of the GO membrane. The filtration performance of modified GO membranes with different mass ratios of nitrobenzene diazonium tetrafluoroborate (NDT) were tested for EB, DR81, and MB. Notably, when the GO : NDT ratio is 1 : 1, it is found that the water flux can be enhanced by more than twice and by nearly 1.4 times its value for EB and DR81, respectively, while maintaining a high rejection (92% for EB and 95% for DR81). In conclusion, the chemical modification of GO through the dediazonization reaction of NDT can indeed improve the separation efficiency of the dye.