As one of the simple and efficient routes to access two-dimensional materials, liquid exfoliation has received considerable interest in recent years. Here, we reported on high-efficient liquid exfoliation of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs) using monoethanolamine (MEA) aqueous solution. The resulting BNNSs were evaluated in terms of the yield and structure characterizations. The results show that the MEA solution can exfoliate BNNSs more efficiently than the currently known solvents and a high yield up to 42% is obtained by ultrasonic exfoliation in MEA-30 wt% H2O solution. Finally, the BNNS-filled epoxy resin with enhanced performance was demonstrated.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s11671-017-2366-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
In
order to lower the capital and operational cost of desalination
and wastewater treatment processes, nanofiltration (NF) membranes
need to have a high water permeation and ionic rejection, while also
maintaining a stable performance through antifouling resistance. Recently,
Turing-type reaction conditions [Science
2018, 360, 518–521] and sacrificed metal organic frame (MOF) nanoparticles
[Nat. Commun.
2018, 9, 2004] have been
reported to introduce nanovoids into thin-film composite (TFC) polyamide
(PA) NF membranes for an improved performance. Herein, we report a
one-step fabrication of thin-film nanocomposite membranes (TFNM) with
controllable nanovoids in the polyamide layer by introducing hollow
zwitterionic nanocapsules (HZNCs) during interfacial polymerization.
It was found that embedding HZNCs increases the membrane
internal free volume, external surface area, and hydrophilicity, thus
enhancing the water permeation and antifouling resistance without
trading off the rejection of multivalent ions. For example, water
permeation of the NF membranes embedded with about 19.0 wt % of HZNCs (73 L m–2 h–1) increased
by 70% relative to the value of the control TFC NF membrane without
HZNCs (43 L m–2 h–1). This increase comes while also maintaining 95% rejection of Na2SO4. Further, we also determined the effect of
the mass loading of HZNCs on the top surface of the TFC
NF membranes on the membrane performance. This work provided a direct
and simple route to fabricate advanced desalination membranes with
a superior separation performance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.