Selective ionic transport through tunable subnanometer pores in single-layer graphene membranes.

By S. O'Hern, Michael S. H. Boutilier, J. Idrobo, Yi Song, Jing Kong, T. Laoui, M. Atieh, R. Karnik. Nano letters (Print), 2014

744 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report selective ionic transport through controlled, high-density, subnanometer diameter pores in macroscopic single-layer graphene membranes. Isolated, reactive defects were first introduced into the graphene lattice through ion bombardment and subsequently enlarged by oxidative etching into permeable pores with diameters of 0.40 ± 0.24 nm and densities exceeding 10(12) cm(-2), while retaining structural integrity of the graphene. Transport measurements across ion-irradiated graphene membranes subjected to in situ etching revealed that the created pores were cation-selective at short oxidation times, consistent with electrostatic repulsion from negatively charged functional groups terminating the pore edges. At longer oxidation times, the pores allowed transport of salt but prevented the transport of a larger organic molecule, indicative of steric size exclusion. The ability to tune the selectivity of graphene through controlled generation of subnanometer pores addresses a significant challenge in the development of advanced nanoporous graphene membranes for nanofiltration, desalination, gas separation, and other applications.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/945df65e28d8722e57b24ac8e151a984e6b46a7e

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Citations in the corpus

Emerging desalination technologies for water treatment: a critical review. (2015, background): “O'Hern et al. (2014) showed that the selectivity of GO membranes can be tuned through the generation of subnanometer pores.”
Fracture of graphene: a review (2015, background): “…al. 2008; Kim et al. 2009), field effect transistors (Novoselov et al. 2004; Xia et al. 2010), nanomechanical resonators (Bunch et al. 2007), DNA sequencing (Merchant et al. 2010; Schneider et al. 2010), gas separation (Koenig et al. 2012) and water desalination devices (O’Hern et al. 2012, 2014).”
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].”