Graphene is a revolutionary carbon material that is one atom thick and will find application in many areas. We have invented a form of graphene, Graph Air, that is uniquely suited to filtering compounds from water through membrane distillation.
Unlike normal water filters, Graph Air can filter out extremely toxic chemical compounds while allowing pure, pH neutral water through. It has narrow channels through which smaller water molecules can pass, but larger dissolved molecules and solvated ions are blocked. All while dealing with high concentrations of acids or alkalines that rapidly destroy other filtering membranes.
Graph Air is showing resistance to the biofouling that plagues current technologies, while delivering a higher flux than polymer membranes in the same application.
Technology
- Unlike other types of graphene, Graph Air is produced in ambient air conditions from liquids
- A membrane distillation device with a Graph Air graphene membrane can produce pure and potentially ultrapure laboratory water in a single step at a significantly reduced cost compared to exiting methods
- Graph Air membranes have been made and operated at 9cm2 scale (roughly enough to produce one litre per day of pure water)
- Current focus is on scaling up to 800cm2 and developing efficient membrane production process.
Applications
The potential applications include:
- Water filtration and purification
- Application in the production of laboratory water
- The semiconductor industry
- biopharmaceutical industry
- difficult-to-treat waste water treatment
- water remediation
- chemical process industry and eventually in desalination where waste heat is available.
Intellectual property
Patents covering the method of producing graphene in air.
The team
Our team has over 35 years' combined experience working with graphene synthesis, characterisation and applications, with over 50 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Contributors to this technology include researchers from The University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney and The Queensland University of Technology.