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. 2021 Jan 21;12:507. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20837-2

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — a Sketch of compressive film wrinkling. Side view of planar and 1D wrinkled films. Figure illustrates that wrinkling tilts the horizontal line into multiple near vertical line segments. b Fabrication steps leading to vertically aligned Zr-GO/epoxy membranes. i, Drying-induced assembly of Zr-GO nanosheets (Zr/C atomic ratio approximately 1/22) on pre-stretched polystyrene substrate (GO film thickness 1 μm). Inset: nanostructure of planar Zr-GO films with horizontal alignment and tortuous flow pathways. Brown strips represent 1 μm thick multilayer GO film segments. The light-yellow box represents the epoxy matrix. Purple spheres represent ZrO(II) cations (unhydrated state for reference). Fully hydrated ZrO(II) diameter is approximately 1 nm, implying that ZrO(II) likely exists in the interlayer spaces in a partially hydrated state complexed with O-containing groups on GO. ii, Wrinkled Zr-GO films are produced by thermally activated mechanical compression. iii, Wrinkled Zr-GO films are removed from the substrate and imbedded into epoxy resin. iv, Multiple cycles of microtome sectioning yield Zr-GO/epoxy composite membranes. v, Side view of vertically aligned Zr-GO/epoxy membrane (VAGME) with the entrances to interlayer nanochannels open at the top and bottom surface. This method transforms a single planar Zr-GO film into hundreds of vertical film segments, where each segment is an array of approximately 1000 GO interlayer nanochannels aligned with a strong Z-directional component.