Advanced functional materials: progress in series of optically driven active ion transport (6)

It is a great challenge in the field of biomimetic energy conversion that

use completely non biological materials to realize the active transport of anti concentration gradient. Previously most synthetic systems required the participation of biological components. The bottleneck of the active transport based on supramolecular systems is that the carrier molecules with mass hundreds of times of the transported materials are required to participate in the transport these systems need to exist in liquid membrane or phospholipid membrane. These characteristics greatly reduce the efficiency stability of the active transport system so it can not be applied in practice.

recently a research team led by Guo Wei of Institute of physical chemical technology Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a driving mode induced by the photoelectric characteristics of membrane materials which coupled the diffusion of photogenerated carriers on the membrane with the transport of ions between layers realized the active transport in two-dimensional ion channel membrane through asymmetric illumination [NAT. Commun. 2019 10 1171]. This driving mode can make many kinds of ions with hydration radius less than 4.5 Å produce anti concentration gradient transport its transport rate is much higher than that of classical diffusion. Furthermore the team has explored a series of asymmetric factors that can induce active transport (as shown in the figure) including asymmetric film thickness [adv. funct. Mate. 2020 30 1907549] asymmetric geometry [small 2020 16 1905557] heterogeneous photochemical reactions [adv. mate. 2019 31 1903029] photoelectric properties of two-dimensional materials [small 2019 15 1905355]. Based on this active transport mode we have developed photoion switches diodes field effect transistors explored their applications in high-throughput seawater desalination [adv. mater. 2020 32 190 3954]. As the sixth important development of this research direction the research team used an unconventional method of pumping two-dimensional material colloidal solution called dual flow filtration (Fig.) to prepare two-dimensional layered materials with planar heterostructure. Under the condition of asymmetric proton concentration cross membrane electric potential the cross membrane proton transport is realized. In the experiment under 100 MW / cm2 illumination the maximum proton transport rate of the planar heterogeneous two-dimensional multilayers is 14.8 molh-1 m-2 which is higher than the previous synthetic systems.

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