Flexible Superhydrophobic Metal-based Carbon Nanotube Membrane for Electrochemically Enhanced Water Treatment.

Treatment of highly saline wastewaters via conventional technology is a key challenging issue, which calls for efficient desalination membranes featuring high flux and rejection, low fouling and excellent stability. Herein, we report a high-strength and flexible electro-conductive stainless steel-carbon nanotube (SS-CNT) membrane, exhibiting significantly enhanced anti-corrosion and anti-fouling ability via a micro-electrical field-coupling strategy during membrane distillation. The membrane substrates exhibited excellent mechanical strength (244.2±9.8 MPa) and ductility, thereby overcoming the critical bottleneck of brittleness of traditional inorganic membranes. By employing a simple surface activation followed by self-catalyzed chemical vapor deposition, CNT was grown in situ on SS substrates via a tip-growth mechanism to finally form robust superhydrophobic SS-CNT membrane. To address the challenging issues of significant corrosion and fouling, by using a negative polarization micro-electrical field-coupling strategy, simultaneously enhanced anti-fouling and anti-corrosion performance was realized for treatment of organic high salinity waters while exhibiting stable high flux and rejection via an electrostatic repulsion and electron supply mechanism. This application-oriented rational design protocol can be potentially used to extend toward high performance composite membranes derived from other electro-conductive metal substrates functionally decorated with CNT network and to other applications in water treatment.

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