SBIR Phase I: Robust Nanofiltration to Enable Challenging Chemical and Pharmaceutical Separations

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The broad impact of the proposed SBIR project is in the development of Graphene oxide based filtration membranes in industrial applications, such as pharmaceutical and chemical production. Current polymer membranes are not meeting specific industrial needs and are unlikely to do so with incremental innovation. On the other hand, converting from distillation and evaporation to membrane-based separation has the potential to reduce energy consumption in the US by 10%. The proposed graphene oxide based material is a robust nanomaterial that is capable of separating streams at the molecular level while withstanding the challenging environments of chemical separations. Successful implementation will increase process intensification and energy efficiency for pharmaceutical and chemical producers, while simultaneously enabling previously inaccessible separations. Graphene Oxide (GO) membranes enable a new materials platform for fine liquid filtration in harsh environments. These temperature stable, solvent resistant, and oxidizer tolerant membranes will accomplish nanofiltration (NF) separation of a range of feed streams. With immediate benefits in reducing cleaning time and downtime for dairy and food production and high impact for energy savings in pharmaceutical and chemical separations, materials innovation for membranes represents a large opportunity for energy and cost savings. GO is synthesized at near ambient temperatures with low-cost synthetic chemistry methods and thus is many orders of magnitude less expensive than graphene. This proposal focuses on further developing the graphene oxide material for the high value pharmaceutical and chemical streams in order to transition from heat-based or low-throughput distillation, evaporation, and chromatography methods towards the significantly lower cost and energy-efficient membrane alternative.