(6ip) Advanced Porous Materials for Scalable Molecular Separation: Integration of Material, and Process, and Engineering

Molecular sieving membranes have created interest as high-performance separation systems for production of petro-based and renewable fuels and chemicals. In particular, Metal Organic frameworks (MOFs), and zeolites have created great potentials for use in high-performance membrane-based separation systems for applications such as olefin production or Xylene separation. However, despite the well-documented demonstrations of MOF and zeolite membranes capable for highly selective separation of molecules with effective size differences as small as 0.01nm, commercialization is hampered by the processability, and processing cost. Moreover, only a few MOF, such as ZIF-8, UIO-66, HKUST-1, among almost unlimited MOFs has been studied due to lack of universal scalable membrane fabrication techniques. I will focus on the investigating possibility of materials, rational design and engineering of energy-efficient molecular separations membrane. Integration of materials, process, and Engineering an will be a critical step towards improving the current energy-intensive chemical processes. will be a critical step towards improving the current energy-intensive chemical processes.

Teaching Interests:

1. Chemical and Biomolecular Separation Processes
The objective of this course is to familiarize the chemical engineering students with the fundamental principles of separation processes. Course topics will include chemical species conservation, macroscopic balances, convective diffusion and mass transfer, separation processes (absorption, distillation, extraction and adsorption), membranes, filtration, sedimentation, separation processes in microelectronics, bio-separations. Throughout the course, a wide variety of mass transfer principles will be introduced to broaden the discussions.

2. Transport Phenomenon

Momentum transport, together with heat and mass transport, constitute the subject of transport phenomena, which plays a central role in much of science and engineering. A rigorous introduction to the fundamentals of momentum transport - commonly known as fluid mechanics - will be provided through this course. The focus will be on isothermal incompressible Newtonian fluids, as their flow behavior is relevant to a broad range of applications and the understanding gained provides a strong foundation for study of more advanced topics. Emphasis will be placed on the use of scaling, non-dimensionalization, and asymptotic analysis to obtain approximate solutions to various problems and to gain physical insight into fluid mechanical phenomena. The techniques and ways of thinking learned in this course will be applicable to mathematical models far beyond those encountered in fluid mechanics.

2. Molecular Thermodynamics and Energy System – Thermodynamics

This course will provide a survey of formal aspects of thermodynamics and its use in practical situations. The underlying principles of thermodynamics and application of these principles to problems of reaction and phase equilibria in pure phases and solutions will be covered in this course. In addition to classical thermodynamics, some elementary statistical mechanics will be introduced in order to help provide insight into the molecular origins of bulk behavior.