Please click this link to join: https://kaust.zoom.us/j/91397575044

Abstract: With the transition to a sustainable, circular economy and a strong emphasis on the recovery and reuse of materials, minerals and nutrients, membrane technology will become increasingly important. Associated to this, the complexity of separations will increase requiring membranes with molecular selectivity suitable for the specific recovery of target valuable components. This comes with demanding membrane characteristics in terms of properties and separation performance. Obviously with this in mind, dedicated membrane design and tunable membrane development and production methods are essential.

In this presentation several methods to tailor membrane morphology and separation properties in the framework of recovery and reuse are discussed. Polymer membranes are currently often prepared using methods like phase separation and interfacial polymerization. Although phase separation was already extensively explored about a decade ago, still this method offers multiple directions to tune membrane morphology. This allows to a certain extent control over pore size and membrane polymer-component interactions, but real molecular separations are out of reach still as phase separation results in broad pore size distributions and interactions are limited due to the use of only few membrane polymer chemistries. To move beyond these limitations, several new concepts only recently explored for the preparation of membranes are evaluated. Starting from methods to tailor retention and permeability at a component level, methods to produce highly porous membrane structures or bi-continuous polymer films are presented. Finally, the role of self-organizing materials as a route to true molecular selectivity is discussed. Parallel to this, multiple examples of the characteristics and performance of membranes developed with these advancing methods are given.

Biography: Prof. dr. ir. Kitty Nijmeijer is professor Membrane Materials and Processes at Eindhoven University of Technology. She received her PhD from the University of Twente (NL) where she became professor Membrane Science and Technology in 2015. In 2016 she got, together with her colleague dr. Zandrie Borneman, the opportunity to start a new research chair Membrane Materials and Processes at Eindhoven University of Technology (NL), which now has ~20 researchers, 3 scientific staff and 3 supportive personnel, and a fully equipped, state-of-the-art membrane lab (~300 m2). Her research is dedicated to molecular design and development of polymer membranes to separate molecular mixtures in sustainable processes. Her research merges materials chemistry, membrane design and formation and membrane process technology. Since 2010 she published over 120 papers that are categorized in three application areas: 1) Water purification and water treatment; 2) Energy generation and storage; 3) energy efficient gas separation. Moreover, she was member of the board of reviewing editors of the scientific journal Science and she is Editorial board member of Journal of Membrane Science. She chaired the International Conference on Membranes (ICOM 2011; ~1200 participants), the leading scientific conference on membranes. She currently is vice-dean of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry of Eindhoven University of Technology. She is winner of the 2018 Academic Society Award of the Dutch Royal Institute of Engineers (KIVI) and recorder two TEDx talks and numerous interviews on the national television to share her passion for science and technology.