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Best practices for covalent organic framework membranes in liquid-phase molecular separations

Covalent organic framework membranes have shown great potential for liquid-phase molecular separations in recent years; however, non-standardized reporting hinders further progress. This Comment proposes best practices to enhance reproducibility, scalability and future industrial applications in the field, covering membrane synthesis, characterization and performance evaluation.

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Fig. 1: COF membrane applications and frequently mentioned parameters in the literature.
Fig. 2: Reporting norms of several essential synthesis parameters.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Centre for Hydrogen Innovations (CHI-P2024-01), the Ministry of Education - Singapore (MOE-T2EP10122-0002), the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (U2102d2004, U2102d2012), the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF-CRP26-2021RS-0002, NRF-NRFI08-2022-0008), the Science and Technology Support Program of Jiangsu Province (BZ2022056), and the National University of Singapore (Suzhou) Research Institute (Energy and Environmental Nanotech Platform).

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Correspondence to Dan Zhao.

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Nature Chemical Engineering thanks Alexander Knebel, Lianshan Li, Shengqian Ma and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Note 1, Supplementary Figs. S1 and S2, Table 1 and extended details.

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Zhang, H., Zhao, D. Best practices for covalent organic framework membranes in liquid-phase molecular separations. Nat Chem Eng 2, 341–344 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-025-00230-w

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