Fig. 3: Desalination performance of robust ultrathin UiO-66/ML-UiO-66 membranes.

a Schematic diagram and (b) photograph of a PV setup for testing UiO-66/ML-UiO-66 membranes fabricated in this work. c Comparison of membrane thickness via a solution-based solvothermal method between UiO-66 membrane fabricated in the current study and other MOF membranes with lowest thickness reported in the literature^{63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70}. d Water flux and salt rejection as a function of feed temperature during the PV process (35 g L⁻¹ NaCl solution) (the inset shows an Arrhenius plot between water flux and reciprocal of feed absolute temperature). e Water flux and salt rejection as a function of feed salt concentration ranging from 5 g L⁻¹ to 95 g L⁻¹ at a constant feed temperature of 70 °C. f Long-term operating desalination performance (water flux, salt rejection and permeate salt concentration) for the treatment of 35 g L⁻¹ NaCl solution for 240 h (10 days) at 70 °C without cleaning. (The red dashed lines in Fig. 3f, h represent the limit (Na⁺ < 200 ppm) of drinking-water quality (fourth edition) issued by the World Health Organization (WHO)). g Comparison of water flux and rejection between our ultrathin ML-UiO-66 membrane and other state-of-the-art polycrystalline zeolite and MOF membranes via PV process (See details in Supplementary Table 9). h Long-term operating desalination performance (water flux, salt rejection and permeate salt concentration) for the treatment of hypersaline water (80 g L⁻¹ NaCl solution) for 240 h (10 days) at 70 °C without cleaning. i Water flux and salt rejection of ultrathin ML-UiO-66 membranes before and after immersion into NaClO solution (1000 ppm) for 240 h (10 days) for an accelerated chlorine resistance test (the inset shows the FE-SEM images of ML-UiO-66 membrane surface before (i-1) and after (i-2) the chlorine resistance test). (PV conditions: feed 35 g L⁻¹ NaCl solution, temperature: 70 °C). (Numbers that follows the ±signs are standard deviation (SD) in this study.).