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

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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.