Water Purification using Graphene Covered Micro-porous, Reusable Carbon Membrane
- PDF / 425,753 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 57 Downloads / 199 Views
Water Purification using Graphene Covered Micro-porous, Reusable Carbon Membrane Pranav Bhagwan Pawar, Santosh K Maurya, Ragvendra Pratap Chaudhary, Dhanashree Badhe, Sumit Saxena, Shobha Shukla Nanostructures Engineering and Modelling Laboratory, Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, MH, India- 400076.
Abstract: The discovery of graphene based materials has led to significant advancement in several different areas. The large surface area, nanoporous structure and availability of delocalized electron network provide a unique opportunity for purification of solvents via adsorption, absorption or simple trapping. This makes graphene based materials as potential candidates for purification and desalination of water. Here we report synthesis of 3D porous network of oxidized graphene for purification of sea water. The membranes fabricated using these frameworks are hierarchically linked intrinsically defected oxidised graphene sheets by long micro-channels and capable of filtering small ions such as Na+ and Cl-. These are easy to fabricate, reusable and economically viable especially for point of use application. We finally show a fabricated device using membrane made from these 3D networks of oxidized graphene. Introduction The recent discovery of graphene and graphene based materials have recently generated a lot of interest in using such materials for purification and desalination of contaminated water due to their novel characteristics such as high porosity, large surface area, high mechanical strength and thermal stability1. Few layered graphene oxide sheets synthesized using Hummer’s method has been used to remove the heavy metal ions like Cd2+ and Co2+ 2. Similarly, the graphene and metal-oxide composites and graphene and polymer3 composite materials have shown significant increase in sorption of metal ions. Nanoporous graphene with hydrogenated pores have been recently suggested as a better replacement for reverse osmosis membrane for desalination4,5,6. They provide large surface area and active sites for immobilization and thinness for better flux. Practical realization of mono-layered graphene sheet is impeded by leakage7 and is mostly ineffective in filtering Na+ ions. As an alternative to expensive graphene based filters, green methods involving the use of plant xylem containing conduit linked via submicron pits have been used by karnik et. al. to filter water. These xylem filters prepared from freshly cut sapwood were found to be effective only for filtering larger dye molecules and e-coli8. However, the small size of Na+ and Cl- ions forms a bottleneck in the development of filtration devices to filter these ions. Unfortunately none of these options provide efficient and economically feasible solution for filtering Na+ and Cl- ions for the production of fresh water from saline or contaminated water source. Here we have reported a simple economical and good adsorbent material in form of 3D oxidized graphene network for water purificatio
Data Loading...
