Description | Molecular Engineering and Sciences Seminar Series From Biomimetic to Bioinspired Membranes: An Unfinished Journey. Abstract: Membranes are rapidly becoming the fastest growing platform for water purification, reuse, and desalination. They are also important for industrial separations, and are being considered for applications involving catalysis and sensing. All synthetic membranes have selectivity-permeablility tradeoff s, i.e if a membrane has high permeability, it will have a lower selectivity between two solutes or between a dissolved solute and a solvent. This is due to the mechanism of solution-diffusion through a wide distribution of free volume elements in non-porous membranes such as reverse osmosis membranes used for desalination and a wide pore size distribution in porous membranes. A simple solution, in concept, to such a challenge is to do what nature does – design precise angstrom to micron scale pores with no polydispersivity. However, so far such an ideal has not been realized in synthetic membranes and in particular for angstrom scale separations. I will describe what we think is an achievement of such an ideal based on pillar[5]arene artificial channels, where pore selectivity and permeability are preserved and demonstrated at each stage from chemical design, molecular transport characterization, simulation, self-assembly to finally membrane fabrication and testing, resulting in bioinspired artificial water channel based block copolymer membranes. This weekly seminar brings together students, faculty and invited guests from various disciplines across campus to explore current trends in molecular engineering and nanotechnology. It is a forum for active interdisciplinary discussions. These talks are open to the public and attract a diverse audience of students and faculty. |
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