Accelerating CO2 transport through nanoconfined magnetic ionic liquid in laminated BN membrane

The development of highly effective and durable CO 2 separation membrane is still a challenge for the carbon capture and storage. Herein, a novel BN nanosheets supported magnetic ionic liquid membrane (BN-SMILM) is constructed by nanoconfining magnetic ionic liquid (MIL) [P 6,6,6,14 ][FeCl 4 ] to the two-dimentional (2D) nanochannels of laminated BN membrane. The 2D nanochannels provide a well support and restricted space for the MIL. The nanoconfinement effect makes the magnetic [FeCl 4 ] - anions align along the center of 2D BN nanochannels, leading to selectively accelerate the CO 2 transport. The nanoconfinement effect and CO 2 separation mechanism are further explicated by the molecular dynamic simulations. As a result, compared with the polymer supported MIL membrane, the as-prepared BN-SMILM exhibits better CO 2 separation performance, with CO 2 permeability of about 227 Barrer and CO 2 /N 2 selectivity of 90 that is above the 2008 Robeson upper-bound. The BN-SMILM also presents excellent long-term stability after 7 days operation, revealing the promising applications in CO 2 separation. This work provides a new strategy to prepare high-performance supported liquid membrane materials towards practical environmental and energy application.