Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2015, 3, 5140-5147

Bin Liang, Wu Zhan, Genggeng Qi, Sensen Lin, Qian Nan, Yuxuan Liu, Bing Cao*, Kai Pan*

As an emerging technology, pervaporation (PV) has shown great promise in fresh water production from salty water. However, the low separation efficiency of the present membranes hinders their practical applications. Here, thin graphene oxide (GO) films with 2D nanochannels were fabricated on polyacrylonitrile (PAN) ultrafiltration membrane using vacuum filtration-assisted assembly method. The GO/PAN composite membrane exhibit a high water flux up to 65.1 L m-2 h-1 with high rejection (about 99.8%) for desalination by pervaporation under the 90 ºC. It is noteworthy that the composite membranes show high performance in treating high salinity water even with a salt concentration up to 100,000 ppm. This makes it possible to use GO-based membrane for seawater desalination, brackish water desalination and reverse o**osis concentrate treatment.