Porous carbon nanosphere-based imprinted composite membrane for selective and effective separation of dibenzothiophene

In spite of the extensive efforts in selective separation membranes, the preparation of molecularly imprinted membranes with both enhanced adsorption capacities and high selectivity still remains strong challenges. Herein, a stepwise imprinting strategy was adopted to construct functionally modified ordered mesoporous carbon nanospheres (f-OMCNs) based molecularly imprinted composite membrane ([email protected]) for the specific and non-destructive extraction of dibenzothiophene (DBT). The key design of [email protected] was integrating f-OMCNs into porous polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane to increase the porosity and imprinted efficiency of imprinted composite membrane. Attributed to the design of the uniform f-OMCNs-based composite structure, as-prepared [email protected] exhibited an outstanding adsorption capacity (101.65 mg g−1), as well as an excellent relative selectivity factor (2.01 and 1.92 with respect to biphenyl and fluorine, respectively). Moreover, 1H NMR spectra and Materials Studio simulation verified that the enhanced selective separation efficiency of [email protected] towards DBT could be mainly originated from the interaction between DBT and functional groups from f-OMCNs-based composite structure. Our synthesis strategy of [email protected] in this work shows strong potential for the efficient selective adsorption and separation of more target molecules.