Guest Lecture by Dr Julius Motuzas

Thursday, 16 August 2018, 10.00-11.30

at Room MM Dept of Chemistry (tentative)

This guest lecture is free for undergraduate and graduate students of the Department of Chemistry UGM. The open lecture is supported by DIKTI World Class Professor Scheme. You have to register to book the seat. The room capacity is limited to 80. Registration link is follow.

https://goo.gl/forms/bJvVBR8NKLGd0P2s1

—————————————————–

Abstract

Fabrication of Porous Inorganic Membranes and their Application in Desalination and Percrystallisation

Julius Motuzas

The University of Queensland, FIM²Lab  Functional Interfacial Materials and Membrane Laboratory, School of Chemical Engineering, Brisbane Qld 4072, Australia

*Corresponding author: j.motuzas@uq.edu, +61 7 336 58835.

Keywords: membrane percrystallisation, salt, crystallisation, ceramic, carbon, desalination

For the last decade, our group has been working on desalination employing inorganic membranes. Our research dealt with the silica, zeolite and carbon membranes. The findings revealed that even assumed highly stable materials such as zeolites are vulnerable in high concentration saline solutions. However, we found that carbon-based membranes are the most stable of all. Very recently, we also demonstrated other way of the inorganic membranes application – the percrystallisation process [1]. In this process the applied vacuum drives a solution through a membrane, causing wetting and formation of a thin-film on the permeate side of the membrane. The wetting of the membrane surface is followed by evaporation of the solvent, providing ideal conditions for continuous nucleation and crystal growth on the membrane surface, resulting in a single-step separation of solute and solvent. The published work showed how the technology was able to process materials like mineral salts, pharmaceuticals, and food products. Those findings show that the work was a significant innovation of classical membrane crystallisation technologies. Membrane crystallisation traditionally utilises transport of either heat or mass to create supersaturation on the feed side of the membrane [2-3], necessitating additional processing steps [4], which are obsolete with the novel percrystallisation process.

Full abstract J. Motuzas Abstract