A Versatile Approach Towards the Fast Fabrication of Highly-Permeable Polymer Mesoporous Membranes

Polymer mesoporous materials have attracted increasing concerns in various fields especially in membrane separation process. Here we report a versatile approach to fabricate novel highly-permeable polymer mesoporous membrane for size-exclusion separation. This approach employs copper hydroxide nanowire thin films as the soluble templates to form a polymer mesoporous separation layer. The membrane formation mechanism is revealed by varying the polymer concentration, the thickness of template films and the size of nanowires. The resultant membranes have a three-layer sandwich structure, allow fast permeation of water, and exhibit excellent size-exclusion separation performances. Typically, the 1.39 µm-thick membrane has a high water flux of 1.17 103 L m−2 h−1 bar−1 and rejections of 94.1 % for ferritin molecules. The developed approach have a great potential in the fabrication of polymer mesoporous materials, and produce the membranes have a wide range of applications including in environmental fields.