1. Mikayla Armstrong PhD Student, ESE
Environmental Sciences and Engineering ~ ENVR 400 ~ In-house Seminar Series
Pursuing the perfect membrane
Strategies to decrease pollutant passage
Mikayla Armstrong PhD Student, ESE
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
2301 McGavran-Greenberg
12:20 – 1:10 p.m.
Synthetic membranes are an attractive technology to implement at interfaces between humans and the environment because their implementation is relatively simplistic compared to technologies that use chemical additives. For example, membrane technology is used extensively in medical (e.g., safe blood donations, intravenous fluid delivery, kidney dialysis), food (e.g., carbonated drinks, production of whey and juices), textiles (e.g., waterproofing), energy generation (e.g., fuel cells), and water/wastewater purification industries (e.g., seawater desalination, water reuse). Membranes are ideal for many applications because they are comprised of polymers with unique physical and chemical properties.
In water purification processes, size and charge exclusion are two physical mechanisms responsible for removing contaminants of interest. As such, pressure-driven membrane separation processes poorly remove small, neutral contaminants. Two neutral contaminants that occur naturally in the environment and are of concern to human and environmental health are trivalent arsenic and boric acid, respectively. Trivalent arsenic contaminates well water and results in adverse health outcomes when ingested orally by humans. Boric acid present in water reuse sources treated for irrigation is toxic for crops. This seminar will focus on two strategies I am exploring to enhance the ability of membranes to remove neutral contaminants. The first strategy employs new insights of the chemical process utilized to fabricate membranes and the second leverages the relative strengths of different membrane materials to design a hybrid membrane more effective than either of the parent materials.