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石墨烯氧化物的滤膜，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，而且不太可能通过渐进式创新来实现。另一方面，从蒸馏和蒸发转变为基于膜的分离有可能使美国的能源消耗减少10%。所提出的基于石墨烯氧化物的材料是一种坚固的纳米材料，能够在分子水平上分离气流，同时经受住具有挑战性的化学分离环境。成功的实施将提高制药和化学品生产商的流程强化和能源效率，同时使以前无法获得的分离成为可能。氧化石墨烯(GO)膜为在恶劣环境中进行精细液体过滤提供了一种新的材料平台。这些温度稳定、耐溶剂和耐氧化剂的膜将实现对一系列进料流的纳滤(NF)分离。由于减少了乳制品和食品生产的清洗时间和停机时间，以及对药品和化学分离的节能效果显著，膜材料创新为节省能源和成本带来了巨大的机遇。GO是在接近环境温度的情况下用低成本的合成化学方法合成的，因此比石墨烯便宜许多个数量级。这项提议的重点是进一步开发用于高价值制药和化学品流的石墨烯氧化物材料，以便从基于热力或低通量的蒸馏、蒸发和层析方法过渡到显著降低成本和能源效率的膜替代方法。

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.