Selective molecular sieving through porous graphene.

By S. Koenig, Luda Wang, J. Pellegrino, J. S. Bunch. Nature Nanotechnology, 2012

1,090 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Membranes act as selective barriers and play an important role in processes such as cellular compartmentalization and industrial-scale chemical and gas purification. The ideal membrane should be as thin as possible to maximize flux, mechanically robust to prevent fracture, and have well-defined pore sizes to increase selectivity. Graphene is an excellent starting point for developing size-selective membranes because of its atomic thickness, high mechanical strength, relative inertness and impermeability to all standard gases. However, pores that can exclude larger molecules but allow smaller molecules to pass through would have to be introduced into the material. Here, we show that ultraviolet-induced oxidative etching can create pores in micrometre-sized graphene membranes, and the resulting membranes can be used as molecular sieves. A pressurized blister test and mechanical resonance are used to measure the transport of a range of gases (H(2), CO(2), Ar, N(2), CH(4) and SF(6)) through the pores. The experimentally measured leak rate, separation factors and Raman spectrum agree well with models based on effusion through a small number of ångstrom-sized pores.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e03369fb86d492d604096293865cb869afd25df

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

In Materials Chemistry

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

Frontiers of graphene and 2D material-based gas sensors for environmental monitoring (2020, background): “Relatively recent works have included osmometers that function via different permeability rates of different gases [396], and pore-size dependent selective effusion [397] can indeed lead to selective gas sensing in the future.”
Ultrathin, Molecular-Sieving Graphene Oxide Membranes for Selective Hydrogen Separation (2013, background): “Koenig et al. (12) found that H2/N2 ideal selectivity for isolated graphene sheets was higher than 10,000 after etching graphene by ultraviolet-induced oxidation.”
A review on mechanics and mechanical properties of 2D materials—Graphene and beyond (2016, background): “In large scale applications of 2D materials, crack-like flaws (cracks, notches, corners and holes) are unavoidable and some of them are even intentionally introduced to achieve specific functions, such as water desalination [151,152], gas separation [153,154] and DNA sequencing [155,156].”