New nanostructured polymer and polymer-graphene hybrid coatings/membranes, typically supported on a porous support (like carbon paper disc or inorganic ceramic tube), are recently developed for two major applications in energy storage and biomass processing for biofuel production, e.g., high-performance supercapacitor electrodes and membrane separations of water molecules/ions. In addition to material chemistries on polymers or surface of the graphene oxide sheets/particles, our research work intends to develop the understanding to control the fundamental nanostructure of building-block graphene unit (i.e., stacked parallel graphene sheets of defined 2D dimension with precisely controlled interspacing by molecular spacers) as well as the architecture of the 3D graphene-polymer materials (i.e., the vertical orientation and connectivity of graphene units inside the polymer-bond hybrids). Two to three orders-of-magnitudes performance enhancements (e.g., in molecular water permeability and ion transport) could be realized due to the well control of nanostructure and architecture of the synthesized hybrid interfacial materials. A key thrust for the functionalized porous inorganic membranes is to enable the use of larger non-zeolitic pores (&gt; 1nm) for the greater permeation flux with the enhanced surface selectivity for molecular separations. Another study focuses on polybenzimidazole polymer and graphene oxide-filled hybrid coating layers on porous metallic/ceramic tube supports for biofuel thermochemical processing related separations such as dewatering of HTL aqueous fractions for carbon (carboxylic acids) recovery and vapor-phase chemistry tailoring of the catalytic fast pyrolysis process. For supercapacitor electrode development, both nanosized dimension and vertical orientation of  ligand-functionalized graphene oxide sheet particles have demonstrated their significant effects on performance. The size control enhancement was more effectively achieved by ~4.2 times higher capacitance, 4.0 times lower IR drops an order of magnitude enhanced mass transport. Compared to the non-aligned counterparts the coating containing vertically aligned graphene sheet particles have shown ~1.6 times higher values in capacitance (430 F/g at 0.5 A/g) and ~67% reduction in equivalent series resistance. New hybrid materials are being also studied for other applications such as in desalination, batteries, and bioseparations processing.<br/>

Emerging hybrid material membranes for biofuel processing and renewable energy applications

2019 Spring National Meeting

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