Scalable Graphene Oxide Hollow Fiber Membranes for Dye Desalination Enabled by Multi-Purpose Polyamine Functionalization

Abstract

2D nanosheets such as graphene oxide (GO) can be stacked to construct membranes with fine-tuned nanochannels to achieve molecular sieving ability. These membranes are often thin to achieve high water permeance, but their fabrication with consistent nanostructures on a large scale presents an enormous challenge. Herein, GO-based hollow fiber membranes (HFMs) are developed for dye desalination by synergistically combining chemical etching to form in-plane nanopores (10-30 nm) to increase water permeance and polyamine functionalization to improve underwater stability and enable facile large-scale production using existing membrane manufacturing processes. HFM modules with areas of 88 cm² and GO layer thicknesses of ≈500 nm are fabricated, and they exhibited a stable dye water permeance of 75 L m^-2 h^-1 bar^-1, rejection of >99.5% for Direct red and Congo red, and Na₂SO₄/dye separation factor of 300-500, superior to state-of-the-art commercial membranes. The versatility of this approach is also demonstrated using different short polyamines and porous substrates. This study reveals a scalable way of designing 2D materials into high-performance robust membranes for practical applications.

Keywords: 2D nanosheets; amine functionalization; dye desalination; holey graphene oxide; hollow fiber membranes.