SusChEM: Sustainably derived high performance nanofiltration membranes with vertically aligned nanopores for organic contaminant removal and water purification

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PI Name: Chinedum OsujiProposal Number: CBET 1703494Access to clean water is a prerequisite for improving or maintaining the quality of human life and boosting economic productivity. Nanofiltration is critically important as a cost-effective method for removing multivalent ions and organic contaminants from water. It is increasingly utilized for pre-discharge treatment and reclamation of industrial wastewaters and to address problems regarding the isolation of contaminants such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. This project addresses the need to improve the performance of current state-of-the-art nanofiltration membranes using sustainable materials. The overarching goal is to fabricate highly-ordered, aligned nanoporous membranes from plant-derived materials using scalable methods and to characterize the performance of these membranes. The industrial relevance and potential utility of the membranes developed here represent broader impacts with significant societal relevance. The project involves a range of additional broader impacts including K-12 outreach, curriculum development focused on environmental remediation, and student training. The potential of self-assembled nanostructured materials to serve as high performance nanofiltration membranes has contributed significantly to interest in understanding and controlling structure-property relationships in such systems. The realization of deliberately nanostructured membranes using sustainable materials requires the development of materials and methods to guide self-assembly of applicable molecular species in membrane-relevant form factors. This project is centered on such efforts. The overarching objective is the scalable fabrication and characterization of high performance nanofiltration membranes for water purification using sustainable materials. Precisely-engineered molecular templates will be used to guide the self-assembly of plant-derived monomers to form ordered systems. Suitably confined, these ordered systems yield aligned nanoporous polymer films upon UV-induced crosslinking of the monomers and subsequent removal of the molecular template. The PI will examine structure-property relationships in self-assembled systems based on plant-derived materials and will systematically characterize the rejection properties of fabricated membranes. New methods will be developed to control the thickness of selective layers in the sub-micron regime and to provide thickness control in the presence of mechanical support layers. The specific objectives are: (1) formation and characterization of self-assembled nanoporous materials using unsaturated fatty acids from vegetable oils as renewable feedstocks; (2) optimization of alignment processes and assembly of nanofiltration membranes; and (3) Systematic performance characterization of nanofiltration membranes.