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Opportunities and challenges for liquid-liquid separation with superwetting membranes across immiscible to miscible systems

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Superwetting separation membranes (SWMs), renowned for their low energy consumption, high efficiency, and high flux in liquid mixture separation, hold promising application prospects across industries such as chemical processing, resource utilization, and environmental remediation. Liquid-liquid separation is an indispensable operation across diverse chemical industries. This perspective highlights recent advances in SWMs for liquid-liquid separation, focusing on mechanisms across immiscible, partially miscible, and fully miscible systems. Immiscible separation relies on tuning membrane surface energy and pore structure, while miscible systems require synergistic control of molecular interactions among solid membranes, inductive agents, and target components. Integration with conventional membrane technologies has enabled innovative module designs to enhance separation efficiency. The perspective provides insights into fundamental mechanisms, optimization strategies, and challenges in transitioning SWMs from lab-scale research to industrial applications. Emphasis is placed on bridging material innovation with scalable fabrication and system integration to accelerate practical implementation in complex separation scenarios. Although superwetting membranes have achieved great success in the separation of layered liquids and emulsions, their application to the separation of miscible liquids has been challenging. In this Perspective, the authors highlight recent advances in superwetting membranes for liquid-liquid separation, focusing on mechanisms across immiscible, partially miscible, and fully miscible systems, providing insight into optimization strategies, and discussing challenges in scalable fabrication for industrial applications.

Source: Communications Chemistry

DOI: 10.1038/s42004-025-01759-w