Fabrication of assembled membrane from malonate-functionalized graphene and evaluation of its permeation performance

The increasing number of studies on graphene membranes has indicated a great potential of graphene in separation applications. For the first time, this study demonstrates liquid permeation performance of a new graphene membrane that assembled functionalized graphene sheets. Functionalized graphene was synthesized from graphene dispersion based on a Bingel reaction with diethyl bromomalonate, and employed to prepare an assembled membrane using a vacuum filtration method. Thus prepared membrane was subjected to permeation tests using four solvents (hexane, acetone, methanol and water). The chemical functionalization led to two interesting consequences: i) Even a relatively minor extent of functionalization dramatically altered the chemical selectivity of the membrane, and ii) the permeability of the membrane was greatly enhanced, which plausibly arose from the less ordered stacking of the functionalized graphene sheets as compared to the pristine ones.

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