Kirk Engineering Lab, Cherry Auditorium

The Materials We Leave Behind: How Manufacturing Research can Expand Material Options for Membranes for Water, Gas, and Ion Separations



strength. The TFC membrane is defined by these two layers being chemically distinct and therefore customizable based on desired characteristics (e.g. cost, processability, selectivity). The most commonly manufactured TFC membrane is the reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration (NF) membrane. These membranes are made through interfacial polymerization, a process developed over 40 years ago by John Cadotte, that enables this selective layer to be formed in-situ directly onto the supporting membrane. The process is scalable and leads to high performance RO membranes, though does have some drawbacks. The process is relatively uncontrollable and is limited to a small subset of polymer materials. In spite of these limitations, this manufacturing process has not changed in over 40 years, meaning the TFC membrane’s use has not expanded into other membrane technology spaces (e.g. gas separations and ion exchange).

In this talk, we provide context for why this has happened and offer a new manufacturing innovation, electrohydrodynamic spray, that may enable the expansion of the TFC membrane to beyond RO and NF. We demonstrate the formation and scale up of defect free membranes using both conventional and unconventional polymers for a number of membrane processes.

Lectures / Presentations