Interfacial Polymerization of Nanofilms for Aqueous Membrane Separations

人口增长、气候变化和生活水平的提高正在给我们的水和金属等重要资源的供应带来压力。对这些资源的可持续管理将是下一个世纪的一项重大挑战。我的研究计划的长期目标是开发高性能的膜材料和工艺，使关键资源的有效分离和回收。在我的团队中工作将直接影响水处理过程（饮用水，废水和海水淡化），并允许改善加拿大重要工业部门的水管理和资源回收，如采矿和金属，纸浆和造纸以及石油和天然气。 在接下来的五年里，我的团队将专注于界面聚合（IP）形成的复合聚合物膜的合成和传输性能。在该过程中，水溶性和油溶性单体在油/水界面处反应，产生薄的交联聚合物网络。我们的工作将有两个与IP相关的广泛目标：（1）更好地了解由IP形成的聚酰胺膜中的水，离子和其他物质的基本渗透行为，这些膜在全球范围内用于反渗透脱盐;（2）扩大IP的使用范围，以创建用于超滤的坚固，高性能的多孔膜。这项工作是原创和创新的，因为它将增加重要材料的基础知识，并将创造新的创新，使水处理工艺得到改进。 研究将由2名博士生，1名MASc学生和5名本科生完成。这项工作具有很高的培训价值，因为它是创新和基础的，涉及最先进的表征技术，并需要多学科的合作。这两名博士生将分别发展聚合物扩散和膜制造方面的专业知识。MASc学生将与博士生合作合成和表征聚酰胺纳米膜。在所有这些工作中，材料将被合成，实验评估其化学和物理结构，并在膜过滤中进行分析，测量的渗透率使用基本传输模型建模。 拟议的研究计划将导致有益于加拿大工业，环境健康和公共卫生的实际创新。特别是，在我们的工作中建立的基础知识和新的膜设计将导致水净化膜的改进，有助于确保保护我们的环境和不间断地向加拿大人和世界各地的人民提供清洁的饮用水。

Population growth, climate change, and increasing standards of living are stressing our supplies of important resources such as water and metals. Sustainable management of these resources will be a crucial challenge in the coming century. The long-term objective of my research program is to develop high-performance membrane materials and processes that enable efficient separation and recovery of critical resources. Work in my group will directly impact water-treatment processes (drinking water, wastewater, and desalination) and allow for improved water management and resource recovery in important Canadian industrial sectors such as mining & metals, pulp & paper, and oil & gas.  Over the next five years, my group will focus on the synthesis and transport properties of composite polymeric membranes formed by interfacial polymerization (IP). In this process, water-soluble and oil-soluble monomers react at the oil/water interface, producing a thin and crosslinked polymer network. Our work will have two broad goals related to IP: (1) better understand the fundamental permeability behavior of water, ions, and other species in polyamide membranes formed by IP that are used globally in reverse-osmosis desalination; and (2) expand the use of IP to create robust, high-performance porous membranes for ultrafiltration. This work is original and innovative as it will increase fundamental knowledge of important materials and will create new innovations that will enable improved water-treatment processes. The research will be accomplished by 2 PhD students, 1 MASc student, and 5 undergraduate students. This work has high training value as it is innovative and fundamental, involves state-of-the-art characterization techniques, and requires multi-disciplinary collaboration. The 2 PhD students will develop expertise in diffusion in polymers and membrane fabrication, respectively. The MASc student will work with the PhD students to synthesize and characterize polyamide nanofilms. In all of this work, materials will be synthesized, experimentally assessed for their chemical and physical structure, and analyzed in membrane filtration, with measured permeabilities modeled using fundamental transport models. The proposed research program will lead to practical innovations that benefit Canadian industries, environmental health, and public health. In particular, fundamental knowledge and new membrane designs established in our work will result in improved membranes for water purification, helping to ensure both the protection of our environment and the uninterrupted supply of clean drinking water to Canadians and people around the world.