One of the disturbing global concerns of the 21st century is freshwater scarcity caused by climate change, population growth, and fast urbanization. An energy-efficient procedure to resolve this problem is water desalination with the aid of membranes currently used in the industries. Novel 2D-material-based membranes have promoted the removal of ions without subnanometer-scale size-adjusting. MXenes are one of the most attractive choices for water desalination among these 2D materials because of their environmentally friendly preparation process, compatibility with organic solvents and water, highly tailorable chemical and physical features, and simple composition with other materials to improve their hydrophilic property. Several prominent desalination techniques, such as ion sieving, capacitive deionization, solar, and pervaporation desalination, have been advanced and developed with the implementation of the MXene-based membrane for water purification in recent years. MXene and MXene composite membranes showed high ion rejection rate and water permeability owing to their ability to tune pore size and interlayer distance between MXene nanosheets.
Elsevier
