The membrane-based desalination: Focus on MOFs and COFs

With the rapid growth of global population and the continuous civilization and industrialization, the freshwater resource crisis has become one of the most important worldwide issues. The membrane-based desalination technology has been widely used in the fields of desalination because of low energy consumption, high efficiency and ease of operation. While there are multiple membrane materials that can be selected as core components during the desalination procedure. Crystalline porous materials including metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) can serve as good alternatives in membrane desalination due to their structural diversity and adjustability, as well as the ease of integrating various guests into their periodically organic structures. Here, we present the synthetic strategies of MOFs- and COFs-based membranes such as interfacial polymerization (IP), in situ growth and layer-by-layer (LBL) technique. Moreover, their applications in various membrane desalination techniques have been surveyed to generalize criteria in facing of numerous MOFs and COFs materials. This review is intending to summarize the recent developments in MOFs- and COFs-based membrane desalination and give a forward-looking strategy for their industrial application. The scientific and technical challenges associated with perspectives are also discussed to inspire further development of advanced desalination membranes.