3:00pm
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4:30pm |
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Polymer Membranes for Energy and Environmental Applications Involving Gas and Water Purification
(Seminar/Conference)
Benny Freeman
Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin
Polymer membranes will be critically important in addressing urgent global needs in the 21st century for reliable, sustainable, efficient access to clean energy and clean water. This presentation will focus on recent advances and applications of polymer membranes for gas separations and water purification, particularly on fundamental structure/property relations important in developing membranes with improved properties. For water purification, this presentation highlights results from a systematic study, carried out over several years in collaboration with Professor Jim McGrath at Virginia Tech, of desalination properties of a new family of highly chlorine tolerant, sulfonated polysulfones. The fundamentals of ion and water transport in these (and related) materials will be discussed. In gas separations, this presentation will discuss structural features important in the use of polymers as rate-controlling membranes for gas separations. First, materials having desirable combinations of high permeability and high selectivity based upon solubility selectivity (e.g., butane removal from natural gas, CO2 separation from H2 or N2) will be presented. Second, polymers can also be tailored to achieve high permeability and high selectivity based upon high diffusivity selectivity. In both cases, materials with high permeability and high selectivity may be prepared.
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540-231-1929