Adsorption of Cations Using Graphene Oxide Loaded with Ionic Liquid: A Molecular Dynamic Simulation

Abstract

Sea water desalination is the process of separating salts from water to produce potable water. It is a very important process for countries that lack fresh water sources such as UAE. Many techniques are used in this process, but the most common one is the reverse osmosis (RO) process, which uses semipermeable membranes. Although this technique is widely used, it has a major drawback which is membrane fouling. Membrane fouling is caused due to inorganic salt deposition. This problem decreases the efficiency of the process and increases the costs. To solve the problem of inorganic salts fouling on the water filtration/desalination membranes, a proposed solution is to treat saltwater using a new adsorbent called GO-IL before sending it to the desalination process. GO-IL is an adsorbent made of graphene oxide nanosheets loaded with an ionic liquid called propylammonium nitrate. Treating saltwater using GO-IL aims to adsorb significant amounts of salts (e.g. Na + and Mg 2+ ) present in water before starting the desalination process. This pretreatment process reduces desalination membrane fouling, enhances the desalination process, and reduces cleaning and maintenance costs. The purpose of our work is to simulate the water pretreatment process using GO-IL on a molecular level scale using the computational power of Molecular Dynamics (MD) Simulations to test its efficiency.