(199d) Bioinspired Ideas for Sustainable Separations

This talk will present some ideas for bioinspired separations that could enable difficult separations while reducing the impact on the environment by reducing energy input, both embedded and operational. This talk with focus on translation of the ideas we have been working in our labs for over a decade now. Membranes are rapidly becoming the fastest growing platform for many process applications in water treatment, pharmaceutical manufacturing and food processing . They are also emerging in importance for carbon capture, hydrocarbon separations, downstream bioprocessing and are being considered for applications involving catalysis and sensing. All synthetic membranes have selectivity-permeablility tradeoffs, i.e. if a membrane has high permeability, it will have a lower selectivity between two solutes or between a dissolved solute and a solvent. Due to this reason, sometimes membranes may not be the solution at all and we will discuss a case like this where simple media filtration enhanced using biological molecules was found to be the most sustainable approach. In molecular separation dense membranes, separation is due to the mechanism of solution-diffusion through a wide distribution of free volume elements which is responsible for the trade-off. A simple solution, in concept, to such a challenge is to do what nature does – design precise angstrom to micron scale pores or free volume elements with no polydispersity. We will discuss bioinspired ideas, and its realization in our lab, and possible applications of such an ideal membrane based on biological protein channels and artificial channels that mimic their structure. Finally, I will describe an ongoing project in our lab to create interfacially polymerized channel-based membranes for highly selective gas separations and other applications.