Reticulated Polyamide Thin-Film Nanocomposite Membranes Incorporated with 2D Boron Nitride Nanosheets for High-Performance Nanofiltration

Xi Zheng; Tao Wang; Shen-Hui Li; Ying-Nan Feng; Zhen-Zhen Zhao; Yong-Sheng Ren; Zhi-Ping Zhao

doi:10.1021/acsami.3c04724

Reticulated Polyamide Thin-Film Nanocomposite Membranes Incorporated with 2D Boron Nitride Nanosheets for High-Performance Nanofiltration

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2023 Jun 14;15(23):28606-28617. doi: 10.1021/acsami.3c04724. Epub 2023 Jun 1.

Authors

Xi Zheng¹, Tao Wang^{1

2}, Shen-Hui Li¹, Ying-Nan Feng¹, Zhen-Zhen Zhao¹, Yong-Sheng Ren³, Zhi-Ping Zhao¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 102488, P. R. China.
² Tangshan Research Institute, Beijing Institute of Technology, Tangshan 063015, P. R. China.
³ State Key Laboratory of High-efficiency Utilization of Coal and Green Chemical Engineering, Department of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, P. R. China.

PMID: 37259858
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.3c04724

Abstract

Nanofiltration (NF) technology has been widely used in saline wastewater treatment due to its unique separation mechanism. However, the NF membrane, as the core of the nanofiltration technology, is restricted by the trade-off between permeability and selectivity, which greatly restricts the development of NF membranes. The interlamellar arrangement of 2D boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs) can provide additional transport channels and selectivity, as well as strong adsorption capacity due to its high specific surface area, exhibiting significant potential for advanced membranes. In this work, BNNSs prepared by tannic acid (TA)-assisted exfoliation (TA@BNNSs) were successfully adopted to fabricate thin-film nanocomposite (TFN) membranes via interfacial polymerization (IP). The resultant TFN membranes' structure and properties were systematically characterized via various methods. The results demonstrated that the surface morphology of polyamide membranes evolved gradually from a nodular structure to a reticular topography, accompanied by the decrease of the thickness of the polyamide selective layer when incorporating TA@BNNSs into the membranes. This phenomenon can be mainly ascribed to that the uptake density and diffusion of piperazine (PIP) monomer were effectively regulated by BNNSs. This is validated by molecular dynamics and revealed by the adsorption of PIP in BN models, the diffusion coefficients, and interaction energies, respectively. In addition, the TFN membranes demonstrated improved permeance and stable solute rejection for the inorganic salts. Specifically, the water flux of PA-TA@BNNSs-10%/PMIA membrane could reach up to 109.1 ± 2.49 L·m^-2·h^-1 while keeping a high rejection of 97.5 ± 0.38% to Na₂SO₄, which was superior to most of the reported membranes in the literature. Besides, the PA-TA@BNNSs-10%/PMIA membrane exhibited an excellent stability in the long-term filtration process. The finding in this work provides a potential strategy for developing the next-generation 2D material-based membranes with high-performance for separation applications.

Keywords: boron nitride nanosheets; interfacial polymerization; molecular simulation; nanofiltration; tannic acid.