As an emerging
technology, forward osmosis (FO) has shown great promise in energy production
from the mixing of fresh water and seawater in estuaries. However, the power
density levels of the present commercial FO membranes hinder their practical
applications in power generation due to the requirement for extremely large
areas of membrane. Here, we use functionalized porous-single-layer graphene as
a FO membrane and study the transport performances of the membrane using
molecular dynamics simulation. For the FO system using fluorinated porous graphene (pore-diameter 11.7 ?, porosity
10%), with an excellent performance for salt rejection, the water flux is 28.1 L cm_2 h which is about 1.8 ×104 times higher than
that of a typical cellulose triacetate membrane. Such high water flux will
certainly bring about a very high power density in pressure retarded osmosis
power generation. This work may generate potential opportunities for
functionalized graphene in FO power generation, seawater desalination and so
forth.
