Bio-inspired gas-entrapping membranes (GEMs) derived from common water-wet materials for green desalination

Hydrophobic Ceramic Membranes for Water Desalination

Hydrophilic ceramic membranes (tubular and planar) made of TiO2 and Al2O3 were efficiently modified with non-fluorinated hydrophobic grafting molecules. As a result of condensation reaction between hydroxyl groups on the membrane and reactive groups of modifiers, the hydrophobic surfaces were obtained. Ceramic materials were chemically modified using three various non-fluorinated grafting agent...

Multilayer Nanoporous Graphene Membranes for Water Desalination.

While single-layer nanoporous graphene (NPG) has shown promise as a reverse osmosis (RO) desalination membrane, multilayer graphene membranes can be synthesized more economically than the single-layer material. In this work, we build upon the knowledge gained to date toward single-layer graphene to explore how multilayer NPG might serve as a RO membrane in water desalination using classical mol...

Electrospun membranes: Next generation membranes for desalination and water/wastewater treatment

Tough, bio-inspired hybrid materials.

The notion of mimicking natural structures in the synthesis of new structural materials has generated enormous interest but has yielded few practical advances. Natural composites achieve strength and toughness through complex hierarchical designs that are extremely difficult to replicate synthetically. We emulate nature's toughening mechanisms by combining two ordinary compounds, aluminum oxide...

Bio-inspired materials: unnatural life.

A t the turn of the nineteenth century, Pieter Harting and George Rainey laid the foundations of a science called “synthetic morphology”1. The inspiration for the name probably came from Wöhler’s discovery of urea synthesis in 1828, a breakthrough commonly perceived to mark the beginning of synthetic organic chemistry. The primary goal of Harting and Rainey’s synthetic morphology was to explain...