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Polymer Composite Materials for Efficient Separations and Energy Applications
Polymer Composite Materials for Efficient Separations and Energy Applications
Research Materials
Research Materials
1. Polymers
Polymers have been used in the past decades to demonstrate structure-property relationships. Our group focuses on a variety of functional polymers below:
Glassy polymers: These have a high glass transition temperature, showing a non-equilibrium state at room temperature, such as polyimide and microporous polymers. These polymers can be used to understand polymer chain packing structure and relate these characteristics to diffusion-based target applications.
Rubbery polymers: These have a low glass transition temperature, showing an equilibrium state at room temperature, such as poly(ethylene glycol)s and ionic liquids for solubility-based target applications.
Phase-separated copolymers: The glassy polymer and rubbery polymer can be combined into phase-separated copolymers, such as block copolymers and graft copolymers. The phase-separated copolymers can leverage the benefits from both glassy and rubbery polymer characteristics, such as high application performance and physical properties.
2. Porous Materials
Metal-organic frameworks are composed of metal ions or metal clusters coordinatively bridged by organic ligands. Because of the diversity of accessible metals and ligands used in metal-organic framework synthesis, a variety of structures with distinct chemical and physical properties can be formed, making these materials of interest for sorption and separation. Metal-organic frameworks can be formed with ultrahigh porosities and internal surface areas up to 10,000 m²/g, tunable pore architectures, and, in many cases, mechanical and chemical stability. Our lab has been rationally designing new metal-organic frameworks to obtain significantly enhanced thermodynamic and kinetic molecular separation.
3. Mixed-Matrix Membranes
Mixed-matrix membranes contain inorganic fillers dispersed in polymers. Mixed-matrix membranes can potentially benefit from the ease of processability of polymer-based systems. To harness the processability of polymers while simultaneously overcoming the upper bound trade-off between permeability and selectivity, inorganic materials have been added to polymers as composites to form hybrid materials. Since inorganic materials may possess specific pore sizes of precise shape and geometry or narrow pore size distributions, these materials may act as efficient molecular sieves to improve diffusivity selectivity, thereby forming polymer-inorganic hybrids with property sets that surpass those of pure polymers alone. In addition, the interfacial engineering between polymers and metal-organic frameworks shows exceptional membrane separation performance.
Research Applications
Research Applications
1. Separations
Separations are crucial in energy and chemical production industries, playing an important role in the production of fuels and chemical building blocks for many plastics. The separations industry consumes 15 quadrillion BTU (Quads) of energy per year in the United States alone, approximately 50% of the total energy consumed by the industrial sector as a whole. The energy-efficient separation methods could save up to 90% in energy costs, eliminating 100 million tons of CO₂ emissions and saving $4 billion in energy costs per year in the United States alone. Our lab focuses on a variety of separations below:
Gas separations (e.g., carbon capture, natural gas purification, hydrogen separation, olefin/paraffin separation, air separation, etc.)
Liquid separations (e.g., water purification, pervaporation, organic solvent nanofiltration, etc.)
Ion separations (e.g., battery separators, heavy metal cation separation, etc.)
2. Energy Applications
Harnessing renewable energy is one of the most effective strategies to address current energy deficiency and environmental issues. It is required to develop new energy materials to achieve high energy efficiency and industrially applicable property sets. Polymer and porous materials are of great interest in energy applications such as solar cells, fuel cells, batteries, and supercapacitors. In particular, our group focuses on hybrid materials composed of polymers and porous materials in the form of membranes. The membrane component in the energy applications can assist in significantly improving electron transport to enhance energy efficiency, as well as ion separation to maintain energy device stability.
3. Catalyst
Porous materials are promising candidates for catalyst application in the chemical industry, such as methanol production and biodiesel production through the oxidation process. In particular, the metal-organic frameworks have crystalline structures with high surface area, favorable for catalyst reactions, but low catalyst activity. Our group focuses on creating heterogeneous catalysts using metal-organic frameworks through the unit (either metal sites or organic ligands) functionalization in the framework. Additionally, the metal-organic frameworks with coordinatively unsaturated metal sites can act as Lewis acidic catalysts. In our lab, designing multi-functional catalysts exhibiting high catalyst performance and stability will be focused on.
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