Akkermansia muciniphila is a probiotic inhabiting host intestinal mucus layers and displays evident easing or therapeutic effects on host enteritis and metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes. The outer...

Thin-film composite membranes formed by conventional interfacial polymerization generally suffer from the depth heterogeneity of the polyamide layer, i.e., nonuniformly distributed free volume pores, leading to the inefficient permselectivity. Here, we demonstrate a facile and versatile approach to tune the nanoscale homogeneity of polyamide-based thin-film composite membranes via inorganic salt-mediated interfacial polymerization process. Molecular dynamics simulations and various characterization techniques elucidate in detail the underlying molecular mechanism by which the salt addition confines and regulates the diffusion of amine monomers to the water-oil interface and thus tunes the nanoscale homogeneity of the polyamide layer. The resulting thin-film composite membranes with thin, smooth, dense, and structurally homogeneous polyamide layers demonstrate a permeance increment of ~20–435% and/or solute rejection enhancement of ~10–170% as well as improved antifouling property for efficient reverse/forward osmosis and nanofiltration separations. This work sheds light on the tunability of the polyamide layer homogeneity via salt-regulated interfacial polymerization process.

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The thermal conductivity of metal−organic frameworks (MOFs) imposes significant impacts on the thermal transfer performance of related adsorption systems in engineering applications. However, how the structural properties of MOFs affect their thermal conductivities has yet to be unraveled. In this work, the thermal conductivities of 18 zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) were calculated by equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. It was revealed that the thermal conductivities of ZIFs were not directly correlated with the commonly investigated structural properties. Thus, two parameters including alignment tensor (A i ) and pathway factor (P f ) were proposed to quantitatively evaluate the orientation and distribution of heat transfer pathways within frameworks, which was demonstrated to correlate better with the thermal conductivities of ZIFs. This study provides new insights into the thermal transfer mechanism within framework-based nanoporous materials, which may also facilitate fundamental understanding and guide the rational design of porous crystals with the thermal conductivity of interest.