Achieving high permeability and enhanced selectivity for Angstrom-scale separations using artificial water channel membranes

Abstract

Synthetic polymer membranes, critical to diverse energy-efficient separations, are subject to permeability-selectivity trade-offs that decrease their overall efficacy. These trade-offs are due to structural variations (e.g., broad pore size distributions) in both nonporous membranes used for Angstrom-scale separations and porous membranes used for nano to micron-scale separations. Biological membranes utilize well-defined Angstrom-scale pores to provide exceptional transport properties and can be used as inspiration to overcome this trade-off. Here, we present a comprehensive demonstration of such a bioinspired approach based on pillar[5]arene artificial water channels, resulting in artificial water channel-based block copolymer membranes. These membranes have a sharp selectivity profile with a molecular weight cutoff of ~500Da, a size range challenging to achieve with current membranes, while achieving a large improvement in permeability (~65 L m^−1 h^−1 bar^−1 compared with 4^–7 L m^−2 h^−1 bar^−1) over similarly rated commercial membranes.