Materials study demonstrates assembly-regulated interfacial polymerization yields Janus polyamide membranes for efficient lithium separation, indicating a scalable design for ion-sieving filters.
Conventional interfacial polymerization is typically governed by rapid and disordered monomer diffusion, which limits precise regulation over through‐thickness structure and electrostatic distribution in polyamide nanofiltration membranes. Here, a reaction‐induced interfacial self‐assembly strategy is developed to regulate membrane growth dynamics and construct Janus polyamide membranes with directional ion‐transport behavior. By introducing 1,14‐dibromotetradecane into the piperazine/trimesoyl chloride interfacial polymerization system, amphiphilic quaternized intermediates are preferentially generated at the water/oil interface and reorganize the local reaction environment prior to continuous polyamide formation. This process transforms conventional diffusion‐dominated interfacial polymerization into an assembly‐regulated growth pathway, resulting in a selective layer with asymmetric through‐thickness chemistry, compact sub‐nanometer transport channels, and positively enriched bottom domains. The resulting membrane exhibits synergistic size‐sieving and localized Donnan exclusion effects for Mg 2+ /Li + separation, achieving a separation factor of 333.7 at a Mg 2+ /Li + mass ratio of 80 together with stable operation over 310 h. Molecular simulations further reveal that the asymmetric electrostatic architecture imposes substantially higher transmembrane free‐energy barriers for Mg 2+ than for Li + , thereby governing directional ion transport. This work demonstrates that transport functionality can be directly encoded during membrane formation through reaction‐field regulation, providing a feasible strategy for constructing asymmetric polyamide membranes with programmable ion‐transport properties.
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Jiang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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