Novel thin-film reverse osmosis membrane with MXene Ti3C2Tx embedded in polyamide to enhance the water flux, anti-fouling and chlorine resistance for water desalination

The development of high performance reverse osmosis (RO) membranes still remains a big challenge due to not only the trade-off between water flux and salt rejection, but also their easy fouling and chlorine attacking. In this paper, a novel thin-film nanocomposite RO membrane with two-dimensional MXene Ti 3 C 2 T x embedded in the polyamide (PA) layer was fabricated by in-situ interfacial polymerization with m-phenylenediamine aqueous solution and trimesoyl chloride. Due to the outstanding diffusion regulating effect of Ti 3 C 2 T x in accordance with the Fick's first law, the water permeability was elevated to a maximum value of 2.53 L m −2  h −1  bar −1  at a high NaCl salt rejection of 98.5%. Simultaneously, the enhanced anti-fouling, and chlorine resistance of the as-obtained PA-Ti 3 C 2 T x membrane were also obtained, outperforming the pristine PA and other related RO membranes in literature. Especially after a chlorine-resistance test at 10000 ppm h, a high salt rejection of 97.1% for the PA-Ti 3 C 2 T x membrane was still retained. Based on the microstructural observation and mechanism analysis, such an improvement in chlorine resistance was mainly ascribed to the interaction between surface functional groups of Ti 3 C 2 T x nanosheets with active chlorine, which effectively protected the PA matrix from being chlorine attacked. This work illustrates successfully a very new use of Ti 3 C 2 T x to improve the comprehensive performance for water desalination membranes for practical applications.