09 April, 2017
The KAUST Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials (AMPM) Center held the Research Conference: New Materials Horizon for Energy-Intensive Industrial Separations on the University's campus from February 20 to 23. It brought together international experts from academia and industry from the membranes and porous materials fields for three days of discussion and events, including a poster session on February 21.
"The conference was aimed at providing a unique forum for academic and industrial researchers to discuss high-impact research topics related to advanced materials science, with a specific emphasis on potential solutions for more energy-efficient industrial separation processes," said Ingo Pinnau, founding director of the AMPM Center and KAUST professor of chemical engineering. "With a focus on topics related to high-impact separation processes and clean environment processes performed in Saudi Arabia, the conference featured specific sessions on natural gas separations, petrochemical separations and CO2 capture and storage."
"It is very difficult to introduce new technologies into a conservative market like petroleum processing," continue Pinnau. "With about 10 percent of the energy in the U.S. being used for industrial separations, one of the technologies that need to be introduced is energy-efficient separation."
"I love membranes—I've worked with them for half of my life," said conference keynote speaker William Koros, the Roberto C. Goizueta Chair for excellence in chemical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar in membranes. Koros was also recently named the inaugural Champion of KAUST for his contributions and partnership as part of the historic journey of the University.
Koros' keynote focused on carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membranes, including their structure and applications for gas separations.
"To have a real-world impact, advanced materials must be translated into large-scale membrane units that are economical," he explained. "However, the issue of scalability is an inconvenient truth, giving the translation to industry a high priority for the separation community."
"Characterization beyond traditional microscopy, scattering and spectroscopy are needed to engineer the sub-angstrom discrimination between penetrants in CMS membranes. The use of carbon overcomes hurdles that limit other advanced materials. I believe that the CMS membrane will change everything—these membranes are the leading edge of the new membrane age and they will provide technological advantages in energy-intensive gas separations," he said.
In his lecture "Inorganic Chemistry in Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) Pores," Associate Professor Christian Doonan from University of Adelaide (Australia) outlined the properties of MOF materials, which are well-known for their ultra-high surface area and gas storage and separation properties and are a focus area of research at the AMPM Center.
"One strategy for enhancing the performance characteristics of MOFs is to post-synthetically line the pores with metal ions," Doonan explained. "We are working to understand the reactivity of the metal ions in the pore spaces, and we now know that reactions in confined spaces can lead to unexpected results. MOFs can be flexible, and through the use of X-ray crystallography, we can further explore this flexibility. Many new insights can be gleaned from the structural insights of X-ray crystallography for MOFs."
Dr. Youssef Belmabkhout, a KAUST senior research scientist and a member of KAUST Professor Mohamed Eddaoudi's Functional Materials Design, Discovery & Development (FMD3) group, also spoke about MOFs in his talk "MOF Molecular Sieves to Address Challenging Gas/Vapor Separations: Myth or Fact?"
"The separation of molecules with close physical properties is a challenging task and is commonly performed using highly energy-intensive techniques," Belmabkhout noted. "After more than six decades of the revolutionary use of zeolite molecular sieves for the separation of physically similar molecules within 1 angstrom difference in size, researchers have now been pushing the limit of sieving separation to fractions of an angstrom. This offers the potential for extremely energy-efficient adsorption technologies."
"In the FMD3 group, we've developed tunable MOF platforms with many interesting intrinsic properties to target the challenging separation of important isomers in the petroleum and petrochemical industries. Our platforms exhibit optimal structural control at the molecular level, and this is useful because different applications have different requirements. Our work now focuses on the third generation of MOFs," he said.
Speaker Professor Eric Favre from the University of Lorraine (France) noted that membrane gas separation is a key process for industrial separations.
"The energy requirement is one of the key issues for separation efficiency, as these processes are costly. Membrane gas separation grew up from a close coordination of materials science and chemical engineering, but there are very few membrane materials and equipment suppliers for this process," Favre said.
"I believe membrane gas separation is a new playing ground for the future—it can offer breakthroughs in product efficiency. However, there is a long and complex road to industrial development from materials science research work," he continued. "We must use process systems engineering (PSE) to improve the separation process, evaluating membranes selectively through PSE. Our work is collaborative by nature, as we must work together with materials scientists to create energy-efficient membrane gas separations, taking into account not only the energy efficiency but also the overall cost of the process and purity, recovery, and productivity."
"Membranes have a huge impact in molecular separations in aqueous systems, especially in desalination," said Professor Andrew Livingston, director of the Barrer Centre, Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College London, during his lecture "Advanced Polymer Membranes for Molecular Separations in Organic Liquids."
"Around 40 to 70 percent of capital and operating costs in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are dedicated to separations, with a substantial fraction of the cost related to the processing of organic liquids," he noted.
"Membrane technology has the potential to provide game-changing alternatives to conventional concentration and purification technologies such as adsorption, chromatography, liquid extraction, evaporation and distillation through the process of organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN). In order to do this, the membranes must offer resilience in organic environments, display attractive selectivities, have good permeance and ideally be resistant to aging and fouling underuse," Livingston said.
"Once the useful permeance has been achieved, further materials innovations that result in better processes are needed—these are in the areas of more accurate separations and better in-service lifetime performance and improved chemical stability," he added.
"We need better membranes and materials for the future, and we must think more about challenging new applications for these membranes, focusing on more selective membranes for these applications," stated Pinnau. "Our AMPM Center is designed for collaborative effort so we can combine our chemistry knowledge with our engineering knowledge for research advances. It is essential for us to understand the membranes' chemistry and their applications, and we also appreciate that many steps must be carried out before commercializing a material."
"KAUST has become a global leader in membranes and porous materials research, becoming part of the world research network dealing with energy-related items," noted Koros. "With the AMPM Center, the University has the depth, breadth, and expertise required for this highly important field."
https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en/news/realizing-a-new-materials-horizon