Providing access to clean water is considered one of the grand engineering challenges of our time. Desalination through reverse osmosis (RO) is an existing practice used to make potable water from the seemingly unlimited resource of seawater. Existing RO membrane technology faces one of two limits: salt selectivity or water flux. Typical systems either demonstrate high salt selectivity and poor flux, or high diffusion rates and low salt selectivity. The first scenario is energy-intensive and consequently expensive while the second scenario is ineffective. Electrospun polymer mats present a novel approach to increasing the selectivity of membranes without sacrificing flux by controlling the surface energy and pore size of the membranes. The objective of this research is to explore and optimize the relationship between amount of poly(ethylene glycol) used to cross-link poly(vinyl alcohol) fibers such that the hydrophilicity, the degree of cross-linking supports, and the surface energy are tuned to the desired selectivity and water flux. The factors that affect the membrane properties will be presented and discussed.

Engineering ion-containing block copolymers as next-generation water purification membranes

251st National Meeting (2016)

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