Customized Membranes for Water Treatment Using Additive Manufacturing

What we can do Pervaporation Gas Permeation Membrane Distillation 4040 Element-scale RO PPE/Mask Testing Organic Solvent NF Bench-scale RO 1812 Element Testing Vapor Permeation From the lab to protype to pilot, CCAST provides a wide range contract research services for membrane processes related to energy efficient separations for all fluids 4 Access to UConn Infrastructure Water Pollution Control Wastewater Reuse Facility UConn Utility Plant Rankin Lab – UConn Facility Seawater Intake Facility Up to 2. MGD processing Up to 1M MGD UV/MF MW power plant 2,400 square foot facility capability tertiary treatment GTCC plant with steam GPM raw seawater Primary and secondary Typical operation at boiler makeup and cooling supply treatment 400, GPD water demand GPM filtered seawater Chlorination/dechlorination Water sent to power plant Largest water user on supply for boiler makeup and campus 600 square foot dry lab for cooling water Softening and deionizing research and small classes. water process train Southern facing sky 5 Sidney Loeb and Srinivasa Sourirajan discovered and then made the first asymmetric reverse osmosis membrane made from cellulose acetate to dramatically improve water flux without a loss of selectivity Flat Sheet Hollow Fiber Selective Dong, Membranes 2018, 8, and Enabled continuous permeable processing Baker, Membrane Technology and Applications, 2012 A Not so Perfect Process Substrate Dependence Uncontrolled Thickness Roughness 0.025 mm 0.1 mm 0.2 mm 0.45 mm Polyamide formation is Different substrates yield different self-limiting and essentially polyamide properties Increased roughness increasing uncontrolled. susceptibility to fouling Huang, L., McCutcheon, J.R., “Impact of Ren, J., Chowdhury, M.R., Qi, J., Xia, L., Huey, B.D., Support Layer Pore Size on McCutcheon, J.R., Relating osmotic performance of Performance of Thin Film Composite thin film composite hollow fiber membranes to Membranes for Forward Osmosis, support layer surface pore size”, Journal of Journal of Membrane Science 483, 2015, Membrane Science, 540, 2017, 344-353. 25-33.35. Ravindran, T, Lounder, S.J., Asatekin, A., McCutcheon, J.R., Printing zwitterionic 30 self-assembled thin film composite membranes: Tuning thickness leads to remarkable permeability for nanofiltration”, Journal of Membrane Science 635, 2021, 119428. Ivo TMHD Verbeke Vankelecom 0.1 1.00% 10.00% EPON concentration (g/ml) ecnaemrep retaW )rab/HML( 100 90 80 70 polyepoxyether 60 50 0.5% no TMHD 40 1.5% no TMHD 30 20 support 10 0 1.00% 10.00% EPON concentration (g/ml) )%( noticejer lagneb esoR Poly(epoxyether) for Chlorine Tolerance Poly (epoxyether) material forms chemically resilient NF membranes Demonstrated chlorine tolerance in prior work Thickness of membranes controlled from 30-600 nm 30-40X permeance over hand cast membranes with near matched rejection Publication in preparation NaCl rejection: 94.4% ± 1.2 10X increase in area to form a large “leaf” 18 coupons cut from around the leaf Consistent performance across the leaf 1812 Module Leaf large enough for a standard prototype module size (up to 22”x36”) Ostwal, M., Wazer, E., Pemberton, M., McCutcheon, J.R. “Scaling electrospray based additive 28 28 manufacturing of polyamide membranes”, Journal of Membrane Science Letters, 2022, 100035.