Fast electrophoretic preparation of large-area two-dimensional titanium carbide membranes for ion sieving

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) lamellar membranes show great application potential and are usually prepared by traditional vacuum filtration (VF), which is time-consuming and not easy to scale-up. Herein, 2D MXene membranes with a large area of up to 575 cm2 are prepared by facile electrophoretic deposition (EPD) within 10 min. The negatively charged MXene nanosheets tend to deposit on anode to assemble 2D stacking membranes. Moreover, large sheets are preferentially deposited because they move faster, which leads to highly ordered 2D structure with excellent ions rejection. The Na+ rejection of the EPD-membrane is ~99.5%, which is higher than that of the VF-membrane (~94.7%) with same thickness. Compared with VF, EPD-membrane area could be enlarged by two orders of magnitude while preparation time is shortened by one order of magnitude. Such EPD process can be extended to prepare other lamellar membranes, as a fast and economic route for scale-up of 2D membranes for different applications.