Collaborative Research: Enabling Multi-Functional 3D Composite Responsive Separation (3D-CoReS) Membranes with Advanced Materials and Innovative Manufacturing

由于当前污染物的浓度越来越高，以及每年导致数百万人死亡或患病的新污染物的引入，世界上的饮用水正变得越来越不安全。膜在水处理、食品包装和制药工业中发挥着越来越重要的作用。目前的制造实践导致膜倾向于具有单一功能，例如限制在以牺牲性能为代价的情况下去除污染物。根据这项赠款，将寻求新的先进制造方法，以避免繁琐的多步骤减法和不可扩展的反复试验方法，这两种方法都是浪费的，会导致时间、成本和材料的重大损失，并导致不希望看到的废品的产生。多层膜包含几个单独的功能层，在这里追求的单一制造步骤中形成的多层膜可以降低成本，并提供更多机会进入这些需要这些先进膜的应用。这一多学科的工作提供了一个教育和指导平台，为来自广泛社区的学生提供整体观点，了解如何解决影响清洁水的关键问题，并以可持续的方式推进技术。该项目的目标是开发一种混合先进制造方法，以制备多功能3D聚合物纳米复合膜。这些3D膜由横跨腹板的两种不同材料和横跨厚度的第三种材料组成，将实现温度响应性和抗微生物行为，允许多功能吸收和解吸污染物以及生物污染控制。这项研究的关键知识缺口解决了缺乏一种技术，即基于传统的可卷到卷的连续涂覆技术，将多种液体从溶液连续涂覆到3D薄膜。在这里，温度响应性聚合物和银纳米颗粒将在生物衍生溶剂中与聚合物混合产生溶液，然后使用混合连续涂层方法浇注，允许一步制造膜。这项研究将为研究多功能3D聚合物纳米复合膜的可行性提供框架，该复合膜有可能为先进的连续涂覆技术开辟道路，这种技术可以通过结构的异质性产生更复杂的材料，否则将难以制造。了解使用工艺开发的材料的工艺-结构-性能关系是否将被阐明，以保持通过材料独立实现的关键性能特性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The world’s drinking water is becoming increasingly unsafe through the growing concentrations of current contaminants and introduction of new contaminants, which kills or sickens millions of people per year. Membranes have played an increasingly important role in water treatment, food packaging and pharmaceutical industries. Current manufacturing practice leads to membranes that tend to have a single function such as being restricted to the removal of contaminants at the expense of performance. New advanced manufacturing approaches are pursued under this grant which avoid the cumbersome multi-step subtractive approaches and non-scalable trial-and-error approaches, both of which are wasteful and result in significant losses in time, cost, materials, and lead to the production of undesired waste products. Multi-layer membranes, which contain several individual functional layers, formed in a single manufacturing step pursued here could reduce cost and provide greater access to these applications requiring these advanced membranes. This multidisciplinary work provides an education and mentoring platform to provide students from a broad range of communities with a wholistic view of how to address critical problems impacting clean water and advance technology in a sustainable way.The goal of this project is to develop a hybrid advanced manufacturing approach to fabricate multifunctional 3D polymeric nanocomposite membranes. These 3D membranes, composed of two different materials across web and a third material through the thickness, will enable temperature-responsiveness and anti-microbial behaviors allowing for multifunctional absorption and desorption of contaminants along with biofouling control. The critical knowledge gap of this research addresses the lack of a technique to continuously coat multiple liquids simultaneously from solution into 3D thin films based on traditional continuous coating techniques amenable for roll-to-roll. Here, temperature-responsive polymers and silver nanoparticles will be mixed with polymers in bioderived solvents to produce solutions, which will be cast using a hybrid continuous coating approach that allows one-step fabrication of the membranes. This research will provide the framework for investigating the feasibility of the multifunctional 3D polymeric nanocomposite membranes with the potential for opening pathways for advanced continuous coating technologies that can lead to more complex materials enable by the heterogeneity of the structures, which otherwise would be difficult to fabricate. An understanding of whether process-structure-property relationships of the materials developed using processes will be elucidated to maintain key performance properties that have been realized with the materials independently.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.