Issue 6, 2021

Conductive carbonaceous membranes: recent progress and future opportunities

Abstract

Electrically conductive membranes have shown tremendous promise in the treatment of water, due to their ability to overcome certain limitations that traditional membranes face. Membranes that can simultaneously serve as electrodes in an electrochemical cell can reduce membrane fouling, degrade contaminants, and even enhance permeability and selectivity in certain separations. Carbonaceous conductive materials are particularly promising for the creation of conductive membranes, due to their high surface area, high conductivity, excellent chemical and electrochemical stability, relative inertness, and wide chemical tunability, all of which are crucial in realizing the full benefits of electrically conductive membranes. In this perspective, we review recent work using carbonaceous conductive membranes for fouling mitigation, contaminant degradation, and permeability and selectivity enhancement, noting the advantages of carbonaceous conductive membranes in each and highlighting areas that we believe are promising future research directions. Based on current advancements, future work should be focused on disentangling mechanisms of fouling reduction, overcoming mass transfer limitations and testing more relevant model systems for contaminant degradation, and identifying large-scale application areas that can benefit from permselective functionality. We also perform a technoeconomic analysis for the addition of an electrified setup to an example desalination plant. Our analysis suggests that the future work towards commercialization should focus on improving the fouling reduction from electrification and reducing electrical energy consumption to justify the application of conductive carbonaceous membranes in water filtration and separation processes.

Graphical abstract: Conductive carbonaceous membranes: recent progress and future opportunities

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Perspective
Submitted
10 Seb 2020
Accepted
25 Nov 2020
First published
25 Nov 2020

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2021,9, 3270-3289

Conductive carbonaceous membranes: recent progress and future opportunities

J. J. Patil, A. Jana, B. A. Getachew, D. S. Bergsman, Z. Gariepy, B. D. Smith, Z. Lu and J. C. Grossman, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2021, 9, 3270 DOI: 10.1039/D0TA08928A

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements