Scientists are pursuing more innovative ways to use existing water, as well as to design new materials for water purification methods.
Water is perhaps Earth’s most critical natural resource. Given increasing demand and increasingly stretched water resources, scientists are pursuing more innovative ways to use and reuse existing water, as well as to design new materials to improve water purification methods.
Synthetically created semi-permeable polymer membranes used for contaminant solute removal can provide a level of advanced treatment and improve the energy efficiency of treating water; however, existing knowledge gaps are limiting transformative advances in membrane technology.
One basic problem is learning how the affinity, or the attraction, between solutes and membrane surfaces impacts many aspects of the water purification process.
“Fouling — where solutes stick to and gunk up membranes — significantly reduces performance and is a major obstacle in designing membranes to treat produced water,” said M. Scott Shell, a chemical engineering professor at UC Santa Barbara, who conducts computational simulations of soft materials and biomaterials.
“If we can fundamentally understand how solute stickiness is affected by the chemical composition of membrane surfaces, including possible patterning of functional groups on these surfaces, then we can begin to design next-generation, fouling-resistant membranes to repel a wide range of solute types,” Shell said.
Now, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Shell and lead author Jacob Monroe, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the department and a former member of Shell’s research group, explain the relevance of macroscopic characterizations of solute-to-surface affinity.
“Solute-surface interactions in water determine the behavior of a huge range of physical phenomena and technologies, but are particularly important in water separation and purification, where often many distinct types of solutes need to be removed or captured,” said Monroe, now a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
“This work tackles the grand challenge of understanding how to design next-generation membranes that can handle huge yearly volumes of highly contaminated water sources, like those produced in oilfield operations, where the concentration of solutes is high and their chemistries quite diverse,” he said.
Solutes are frequently characterized as spanning a range from hydrophilic, which can be thought of as water-liking and dissolving easily in water, to hydrophobic, or water-disliking and preferring to separate from water, like oil.
Surfaces span the same range; for example, water beads up on hydrophobic surfaces and spreads out on hydrophilic surfaces. Hydrophilic solutes like to stick to hydrophilic surfaces, and hydrophobic solutes stick to hydrophobic surfaces.
Here, the researchers corroborated the expectation that “like sticks to like,” but also discovered, surprisingly, that the complete picture is more complex.
“Among the wide range of chemistries that we considered, we found that hydrophilic solutes also like hydrophobic surfaces, and that hydrophobic solutes also like hydrophilic surfaces, though these attractions are weaker than those of like to like,” explained Monroe, referencing the eight solutes the group tested, ranging from ammonia and boric acid, to isopropanol and methane.
The group selected small-molecule solutes typically found in produced waters to provide a fundamental perspective on solute-surface affinity.
The computational research group developed an algorithm to repattern surfaces by rearranging surface chemical groups in order to minimize or maximize the affinity of a given solute to the surface, or alternatively, to maximize the surface affinity of one solute relative to that of another.
Originally published at Nooz Hawk