Stacked MXene nanosheets form uniform sub-nanometer channels that let hydrogen through 160 times faster than CO2, beating the best existing gas-separation membranes.
Pushing harder through an oil-filtering membrane gets more oil through but lets more water slip past — faster cross-flow raises flux too, while keeping fouling easier to wash off.
Hydrogen atoms pushed through a palladium membrane can recombine into H2 and re-split, and tuning the membrane's surface coating controls which pathway drives hydrogenation.
Adding tiny amounts of a CO2-attracting porous powder to polyurethane films more than doubled CO2 flow and boosted CO2-over-nitrogen selectivity by up to 454%.
Better-engineered reactor hardware — flow cells, gas-diffusion cathodes, packed-bed electrodes, built-in separation — is the main lever for making microbial electrosynthesis of fuels from CO2 practical.