Ion exchange membranes in environmental applications: Comprehensive review
Chemosphere, cilt.377, 2025 (Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Derleme
- Cilt numarası: 377
- Basım Tarihi: 2025
- Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2025.144327
- Dergi Adı: Chemosphere
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus, Artic & Antarctic Regions, BIOSIS, Chemical Abstracts Core, Chimica, Compendex, EMBASE, Environment Index, Geobase, Greenfile, Public Affairs Index
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Environmental sustainability, Ion exchange membranes, Nanocomposite membranes, Renewable energy, Resource recovery, Water desalination
- Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır
Özet
Ion exchange membranes (IEMs) are transformative materials in environmental and industrial applications, offering selective ion transport capabilities crucial for water desalination, wastewater treatment, energy generation, and resource recovery. Recent advancements have focused on developing nanocomposite and organic-inorganic hybrid membranes, integrating materials like graphene oxide, silica, and carbon nanotubes to enhance mechanical strength, thermal stability, and chemical resistance. These innovations have yielded remarkable results, such as achieving 77.9 % energy conversion efficiency and current densities of 1000 mA/cm2 in seawater electrolysis systems. Additionally, advanced IEMs demonstrate significant improvements in selective ion removal, with lithium recovery efficiencies reaching 93 % and fluoride reduction below WHO guidelines. Despite these successes, challenges like fouling, chemical degradation, high costs, and scalability barriers remain. Future research directions emphasize sustainability, with a focus on biopolymer-based membranes, renewable energy integration, and computational modeling. By addressing these challenges, IEMs can significantly contribute to global environmental sustainability and resource efficiency. IEMs are vital in energy generation, enabling ion transport in fuel cells (PEMFCs, AEMFCs) for clean energy, redox flow batteries (VRFBs) for efficient energy storage, and electrolyzers (PEMELs, AEMELs) for hydrogen production. They also support salinity gradient power in reverse electrodialysis (RED) and pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) and facilitate CO2 electroreduction (CO2RR) for carbon-neutral fuel production. This review (covering 2020–2024 publication years) explores recent developments in IEM technology, highlighting their applications, challenges, and future prospects in addressing global environmental and industrial challenges.