Advanced Functional Membranes Based on Amphiphilic Copolymers

Abstract

Membranes with advanced and novel functions play important roles in emerging applications ranging from industrial separations, water purification, energy harvesting and storage, health care, biomimetic membranes and more. The performances of membranes in these critical applications are essentially determined by their interfacial interactions with surrounding ions, molecules, particles, emulsions, and bioactive agents. Amphiphilic copolymers containing both hydrophobic and hydrophilic segments will spontaneously assemble into multiphase and hierarchical structures, providing a general solution for regulating the surface physical-chemical properties of membranes used in the aforementioned urgent applications. Controlled synthesis of amphiphilic copolymers and the methods to fabricate copolymers into membranes with predetermined performance are fundamentally important for their applications. In this work, we first summarize the polymerization techniques developed to synthesize amphiphilic copolymers used for membrane materials. We then review the methods to fabricate membranes from amphiphilic copolymers, and summarize urgent applications of advanced functional membranes produced from amphiphilic copolymers. We also discuss some remaining challenges and provide remarks for future perspectives, especially considering that the circular polymer economy and artificial intelligence have already set new requirements for polymer science. This work offers a comprehensive overview of recent advances in functional materials based on amphiphilic polymers, including the working principles and associations between polymer structure, processing strategy, and membrane performances, which can provide new insights into the development of high performance and next generation of polymeric membranes through the precise, function-led synthesis of novel amphiphilic copolymers and controlled membrane fabrication process.