Collaborative Research: Identification of Fundamental Processing-Structure-Property Relationships for Scalable Manufacturing of Self-Assembled Block Polymer Membranes

基于膜的化学分离对于食品生产、饮用水净化和治疗药物的开发至关重要。然而，必须采用先进的技术来降低目前许多膜纯化程序的成本。例如，用于海水淡化的反渗透分离技术在成本和能源消耗方面曾经昂贵得令人望而却步。然而，近几十年来，反渗透膜材料和结构的优化使其成为一种具有竞争力的水处理技术。先进的膜分离也存在类似的机会，可以取代其他能源效率低且对环境有害的成熟工艺，如色谱法和萃取法。然而，这样做需要过渡到设计师的自组装纳米材料，以便生产具有明确且可调的纳米结构的下一代膜。本研究项目的目的是通过自组装和非溶剂诱导相分离涂层工艺，确定控制嵌段聚合物膜的加工、纳米结构和性能之间相互作用的关键材料关系，并对嵌段聚合物膜的结构和性能进行评估。最初将使用定制合成的三嵌段分子以实验室规模制备膜。分离性能将与膜的纳米结构和自组装三嵌段聚合物分子的物理化学性质相关。将进行蒸发控制流变测量，以量化的机械性能和组装动力学在活性层的早期形成。这将允许确定将实验室规模的涂布工艺完全转化为使用卷对卷涂布机的高性能膜的可扩展制造所需的最佳浇铸溶液浓度、溶剂蒸发速率和蒸发时间。该研究项目的主要成果将是大规模制造和展示一种高性能膜，该膜具有可调的分离性能和选择性，可以用现代高通量制造技术进行加工。这里确定的基本加工-结构-性质关系将导致膜设计和制造的进展，除了提供新的途径，探索大分子加工科学。

Membrane-based chemical separations are essential to the production of food, the purification of drinking water, and the development of therapeutic medicine. However, advanced technologies must be employed to lower the costs of many current membrane purification procedures. For example, reverse osmosis separation technology used for seawater desalination was once prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and energy consumption. However in recent decades, optimization of the reverse osmosis membrane material and structure made it a competitive technology for water treatment. Similar opportunities exist for advanced membrane separations to replace other well-established processes that are energy inefficient and environmentally-taxing such as chromatography and extraction. However, doing so will require transitioning to designer, self-assembled nanomaterials in order to produce next-generation membranes with well-defined and tunable nanostructures. This award will study the fabrication of block copolymer-based membranes and evaluate their structure and performance.The objective of this research project is to identify the key material relationships that control the interplay between processing, nanostructure, and performance of block-polymer-based membranes created using self-assembly and non-solvent induced phase separation coating process. Membranes will be prepared at the laboratory-scale initially using custom synthesized triblock molecules. Separation performance will be correlated with the nanostructure of the membrane and physicochemical properties of the self-assembled triblock polymer molecule. Evaporation-controlled rheological measurements will be performed to quantify the mechanical properties and assembly kinetics during the early-stage formation of the active layer. This will allow for the determination of the optimum casting solution concentration, solvent evaporation rate, and evaporation period required to fully translate the lab-scale coating process to scalable manufacturing of high-performance membranes using a roll-to-roll coater. The primary outcome of this research project will be the large-scale fabrication and demonstration of a high-performance membrane with tunable separation performance and selectivity that can be processed with modern high-throughput manufacturing technology. The fundamental processing-structure-property relationships identified here will lead to advances in membrane design and fabrication in addition to providing new avenues of exploration within macromolecular processing science.