Congratulations to Ming-bang Wu for his recent publication on J. Mater. Chem. A

Large-scale fabrication of nanofilms directly on macro-porous substrates remains a major challenge in preparing advanced separation membranes. In this work, polyphenol/polyamine nanofilms with a minimum thickness around 13 nm were formed at the gas/liquid interface and simultaneously composited onto hydrophobic macro-porous substrates with the pore size of several hundreds of nanometers, a process driven by high oxygen concentration and interfacial energy at the interface. The as-prepared nanofilms show nearly complete rejection to a wide spectrum of dye molecules, and above 90% rejection to divalent cations such as Mg2+ and Ca2+ with a relative high permeate flux above 15 L m−2 h−1bar−1, demonstrating great potential in ionic and molecular sieving processes.

DOI: 10.1039/c7ta10438c