Recently, a research team led by Prof. Wang Yong from the School of Energy and Environment, 91抖淫, and the Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Environmental Functional Polymer Materials, was invited by the internationally renowned review journal Accounts of Chemical Research to publish a paper titled “Ordering Covalent-Organic Frameworks toward Next-Generation Nanofiltration.” The paper summarizes the team's recent progress in uniform-pore nanofiltration membranes based on covalent-organic frameworks (COFs). It provides an analysis and outlook for the development of this field.
Nanofiltration is an important membrane separation technology widely used in water treatment, pharmaceutical separation, and ion extraction. Covalent-organic framework (COF) membranes possess unique advantages such as monodisperse nanopores, tunable pore chemical environments, and excellent stability, demonstrating great potential in nanofiltration applications. Since 2018, Prof. Wang Yong's team has focused on using COFs as membrane materials and has been committed to the development of COF membranes with uniform pores. Centered on the key scientific issue of structural ordering, the team has achieved a series of significant breakthroughs to overcome performance limitations of conventional membrane materials.
The team first adopted molecular dynamics simulations to reveal the mechanisms by which pore properties regulate the transport behavior of molecules and ions. To address challenges such as insufficient crystallinity and disordered pore orientation in COF membranes, the researchers proposed methods including variable-temperature synthesis and solvent vapor annealing, achieving highly selective separation performance. On this basis, the team further constructed Turing structures and nano-protrusion array structures, which significantly increased the effective mass transfer area while maintaining precise molecular sieving, thereby enabling simultaneous enhancement of both permeability and selectivity. In addition, by introducing photoresponsive azobenzene units, the researchers realized dynamic regulation of pore size and pore polarity, providing a new approach for intelligent membrane separation. While advancing fundamental research, the team also paid particular attention to scalable fabrication methods. Through techniques such as interfacial polymerization, nanosheet assembly, and spray coating, they successfully produced large-area COF nanofiltration membranes, bridging the gap between laboratory research and practical applications and laying the foundation for large-scale production and industrial use.
The first author of the paper is Yin Congcong, a Zhishan postdoctoral researcher from the School of Energy and Environment. Prof. Wang Yong is the corresponding author, while Southeast University is the corresponding institution. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation.
Paper's link:https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.accounts.5c00752
Source: School of Energy and Environment, Southeast University
Translated by: Melody Zhang
Edited by: Leah Li
