Nanoparticles@rGO membrane enabling highly enhanced water permeability and structural stability with preserved selectivity

Developing advanced membranes with high separation performance and robust mechanical properties is critical to the current water crisis. Herein, a general and scalable fabrication of nanoparticles (NPs)@reduced graphene oxide (rGO) membranes with significantly expanded nanochannels meanwhile ordered laminar structures using in situ synthesized NPs@rGO nanosheets as building blocks is reported. Size- and density-controllable NPs were uniformly grown on the regularly stacked rGO nanosheets through coordination, followed by filtration-deposition on inner surface of porous ceramic tubes. The NPs bonded rGO building blocks enabled the as-prepared membranes 1–2 orders of magnitudes higher water permeance than the counterparts while keeping excellent rejections for various organic matters and ions. Moreover, the industrially preferred GO-based tubular membrane exhibited an extraordinary structural stability under high-pressure and cross-flow process of water purification, which is considered as a notable step toward realizing scalable GO-based membranes.