Antibiotic residues in drinking water have become a global problem, especially in developing countries. However, effective purification of water contaminated by antibiotics remains a great challenge. Here, we investigated the removing of tetracycline by carbon nanomaterials with different structures and surface functionalities. The result shows that a membrane of thick graphene oxide (GO) and activated carbon (AC) with a thickness of 15 μm can effectively remove 98.9% of tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH) from water by vacuum filtration. Structural analysis indicated that the AC nanoparticles were uniformly inserted into the GO interstitial sites without any aggregations. Also, GO sheets were loosened by the encapsulated AC nanoparticles, leading to the formation of numerous tiny pores (3–10 nm) that acted as channels for fluid passage, whereas the carbons and chemical groups on the GO surface adsorbed TCH. GO/AC membrane exhibits the best adsorption efficiency among the investigated materials, including pure GO, AC, carbon nanotube (CNT), and CNT/AC and GO/CNT hybrids.

The instability of graphene oxide (GO) membranes in aqueous solutions restricts their application in wastewater treatment through the membrane separation technology. In this work, a nanocomposite membrane (Sm-MOF/GO) composed of samarium metal–organic frameworks (Sm-MOFs) and GO nanosheets was successfully fabricated via the filtration of the corresponding Sm-MOF/GO dispersions. The in situ growth of Sm-MOF with aqueous stability on the GO sheets prevented the adjacent GO layers from expanding in aqueous solutions, thus endowing the prepared Sm-MOF/GO membrane with a stable membrane skeleton structure. Besides, the successful loading of Sm-MOF enlarged the layer space of the composite membrane, which was beneficial for higher permeance. The optimization of the Sm-MOF loading contents was also investigated to prepare M-X (where X represents the mass ratio of the MOF raw material to the total mass of the reactants). Subsequently, the fabricated M-0.31 possessed a high permeance of 26 L m⁻² h⁻¹ bar⁻¹, which was 3 times higher than that of a pure GO membrane; moreover, high rejections (>91%) to rhodamine B and methylene blue were obtained. After continuous 5.5 h filtration, the excellent rejection was still maintained as expected, indicating the long-term stability of M-0.31.