ABSTRACT
Water scarcity is one of the major resource crisis worldwide. Only 3% of Earth’s water is fresh and suitable for human consumption. Given the abundance of salty water from seas and oceans, there is a need to purify such water using economical and environmentally friendly processes. Seawater desalination has long been practiced on this issue. The most widely used commercial desalination techniques are reverse osmosis (RO), electrodialysis, and nanofiltration. They are all energy- and capital-intensive. Nanoporous membranes promise to be more efficient than the existing technology and may yield savings in energy consumption during RO operations. Experimental and simulation studies manifest that membranes having a nanosized pore network can operate as molecular sieves, likely letting only the water molecules pass through the cavities while excluding the ions of the solvent. Carbon-based membranes with micropore size distributions have earned a great merit for research on this outlook. This chapter reviews existing models of carbonaceous membrane systems for desalination. These models depict structures of well-ordered and arranged carbon nanotubes or they define stackings of graphene and graphene oxide sheets. We discuss some examples of biomimetic models that have been also proposed for water treatment. Desalination of these systems has been modeled with either molecular dynamics or Monte Carlo methods.
