These nanochannels can be used in a variety of ways, which scientists are now exploring, but the thinness of graphene causes a problem for filtration: liquid has to spend much of its time travelling along the horizontal plane, rather than the vertical one, which would be much quicker.
To solve this problem, the team behind the new study used an elastic substrate to scrunch up the graphene layer into a microscopic series of peaks and valleys.
"When you start wrinkling the graphene, you're tilting the sheets and the channels out of plane," says materials scientist Muchun Liu from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Liu and her colleagues have given the new materials the name VAGMEs (vertically aligned graphene membranes), and further down the line they could find uses far beyond making water safe to drink.
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