Self-Assembled Soft Materials for Membrane Applications

Soft materials that self-assemble into regular, periodic nanostructures, such as block copolymers, liquid crystals, and layer-by-layer films, provide several opportunities to design and fabricate superior next generation membranes. These membranes can be deployed in traditional settings such as in separation processes and as protective barrier coatings as well as in novel applications (e.g, controlled release technologies). This session is dedicated to theoretical, computational, and experimental research that investigates 1) how to process self-assembled materials into functional membranes, 2) the development of fundamental structure-property relationships, and 3) the performance of next-generation membranes in operation.