Water desalination with a single-layer MoS2 nanopore
By M. Heiranian, Amir Barati Farimani, N. Aluru. Nature Communications, 2015
692 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Efficient desalination of water continues to be a problem facing the society. Advances in nanotechnology have led to the development of a variety of nanoporous membranes for water purification. Here we show, by performing molecular dynamics simulations, that a nanopore in a single-layer molybdenum disulfide can effectively reject ions and allow transport of water at a high rate. More than 88% of ions are rejected by membranes having pore areas ranging from 20 to 60 Å2. Water flux is found to be two to five orders of magnitude greater than that of other known nanoporous membranes. Pore chemistry is shown to play a significant role in modulating the water flux. Pores with only molybdenum atoms on their edges lead to higher fluxes, which are ∼70% greater than that of graphene nanopores. These observations are explained by permeation coefficients, energy barriers, water density and velocity distributions in the pores. Nanopores in two-dimensional materials are arousing considerable interest as filtration membranes to solve the problem of providing fresh water to a growing population. Here, the authors evaluate the potential of single-layer MoS2to effectively reject salt ions whilst maintaining high flow rates.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9e9678f3a2c648f6e378fe232c4c517280674ff
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Thin film nanocomposite reverse osmosis membrane modified by two dimensional laminar MoS2 with improved desalination performance and fouling-resistant characteristics (2019, background): “Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations suggested that a single-layer MoS2 with a nanopore area of 20–60 Å2 can effectively reject 88% of salt ions [14] and the hydrophilic sites at the edge of the nanopores could also give rise to the attraction of water molecules, which enhances the water permeation r”