Aquaporin-like water transport in nanoporous crystalline layered carbon nitride

Fabrizia Foglia; Adam J Clancy; Jasper Berry-Gair; Karolina Lisowska; Martin C Wilding; Theo M Suter; Thomas S Miller; Keenan Smith; Franz Demmel; Markus Appel; Victoria García Sakai; Andrea Sella; Christopher A Howard; Madhusudan Tyagi; Furio Corà; Paul F McMillan

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abb6011

Aquaporin-like water transport in nanoporous crystalline layered carbon nitride

Sci Adv. 2020 Sep 25;6(39):eabb6011. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abb6011. Print 2020 Sep.

Authors

Fabrizia Foglia¹, Adam J Clancy¹, Jasper Berry-Gair¹, Karolina Lisowska¹, Martin C Wilding², Theo M Suter³, Thomas S Miller³, Keenan Smith³, Franz Demmel⁴, Markus Appel⁵, Victoria García Sakai⁴, Andrea Sella¹, Christopher A Howard⁶, Madhusudan Tyagi^{7

8}, Furio Corà¹, Paul F McMillan⁹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Christopher Ingold Laboratory, University College London, 20 Gordon St., London WC1H 0AJ, UK.
² University of Manchester at Harwell, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Didcot, Oxfordshire, OX11 0DE, UK.
³ Electrochemical Innovation Lab, Department of Chemical Engineering, University College London, Torrington Place, London WC1E 7JE, UK.
⁴ ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Chilton OX11 0QX, UK.
⁵ Institut Laue Langevin, 71 avenue des Martyrs, CS 20156, 38042 Grenoble CEDEX 9, France.
⁶ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
⁷ NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA.
⁸ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
⁹ Department of Chemistry, Christopher Ingold Laboratory, University College London, 20 Gordon St., London WC1H 0AJ, UK. p.f.mcmillan@ucl.ac.uk.

Abstract

Designing next-generation fuel cell and filtration devices requires the development of nanoporous materials that allow rapid and reversible uptake and directed transport of water molecules. Here, we combine neutron spectroscopy and first-principles calculations to demonstrate rapid transport of molecular H₂O through nanometer-sized voids ordered within the layers of crystalline carbon nitride with a polytriazine imide structure. The transport mechanism involves a sequence of molecular orientation reversals directed by hydrogen-bonding interactions as the neutral molecules traverse the interlayer gap and pass through the intralayer voids that show similarities with the transport of water through transmembrane aquaporin channels in biological systems. The results suggest that nanoporous layered carbon nitrides can be useful for developing high-performance membranes.

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