Nanoporous alumina membranes for chromatography and molecular transporting

Abstract

Nanoporous membrane based molecular separation and transporting have gained huge attention in recent years due to an immediate need for simple, cost-competitive, and miniature ultrafiltration, chromatography and desalination devices. Nanoporous anodic alumina membranes (NAAMs) are one of the most popular materials of choice for the aforementioned applications due to its outstanding and unique set of chemical, physical, and structural properties. This chapter provides details of fabrication of NAAMs and surface modification techniques employed for enabling NAAMs for chromatography and molecular transporting applications. Next, fundamentals of chromatography and recent studies on nanopore-chromatographic systems based on nanoporous anodic alumina are summarized. Also, fundamentals of molecular transporting across NAAMs and recent examples are compiled in this chapter. The objective of this chapter is to provide a simple yet detailed overview of fabrication of NAAMs based chromatographic and molecular transporting devices with an emphasis on their performance.