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

拟议的SBIR项目的广泛影响是在工业应用中开发基于氧化石墨烯的过滤膜，如制药和化工生产。目前的聚合物膜不能满足特定的工业需求，也不太可能通过渐进式创新来满足这些需求。另一方面，在美国，从蒸馏和蒸发转化为膜基分离有可能减少10%的能源消耗。所提出的氧化石墨烯基材料是一种坚固的纳米材料，能够在分子水平上分离流体，同时承受化学分离的挑战性环境。成功的实施将提高制药和化学生产商的工艺集约化和能源效率，同时使以前无法获得的分离成为可能。氧化石墨烯（GO）膜为恶劣环境下的精细液体过滤提供了新的材料平台。这些温度稳定，耐溶剂，耐氧化剂的膜将完成纳滤（NF）分离范围的饲料流。膜材料的创新在减少乳制品和食品生产的清洁时间和停机时间方面具有立竿见影的好处，对制药和化学分离的节能有很大的影响，这代表了节约能源和成本的巨大机会。氧化石墨烯是用低成本的合成化学方法在接近环境温度下合成的，因此比石墨烯便宜很多个数量级。该提案的重点是进一步开发用于高价值制药和化学流的氧化石墨烯材料，以便从热基或低通量蒸馏，蒸发和色谱方法过渡到成本更低且节能的膜替代品。

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.