New study uncovers model secrets of desalination membranes

Nature has figured out how to make great membranes: biological membranes let the right stuff into cells while keeping the wrong stuff out. They are remarkable and ideal for their job. But they're not necessarily ideal for high-volume, industrial jobs such as pushing saltwater through a membrane to remove salt and make fresh water for drinking, irrigating crops, watering livestock or creating energy.

Can we learn from those high-performing biological membranes? Can we apply nature's homogenous design strategies to manufactured polymer membranes? Can we quantify what makes some industrial membranes perform better than others?

Researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, DuPont Water Solutions and Dow Chemical Co, led by Enrique Gomez at Penn State and Manish Kumar at UT Austin, have now used transmission electron microscopy and 3D computational modeling to find answers to these questions.

Iowa State's Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, a professor in engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Biswajit Khara, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, contributed their expertise in applied mathematics, high-performance computing and 3D modeling to the project.

The researchers found that creating a uniform membrane density down to the nanoscale of billionths of a meter is crucial for maximizing the performance of polymer membranes for water filtration. They report their findings in a paper in Science.

Working with Penn State's transmission electron microscope measurements of four different polymer membranes used for water desalination, the Iowa State engineers predicted water flow by developing 3D models of the membranes. This allowed a detailed comparative analysis of why some membranes performed better than others.

"The simulations were able to tease out that membranes that are more uniform – that have no 'hot spots' – have uniform flow and better performance," Ganapathysubramanian said. "The secret ingredient is less inhomogeneity."

These findings are highlighted in the image that graces the cover of the issue of Science containing their paper, which the Iowa State researchers created with assistance from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (see image). Red above the membrane shows water under higher pressure and with higher concentrations of salt; the gold, granular, sponge-like structure in the middle shows denser and less-dense areas within the salt-stopping membrane; silver channels show how water flows through; and the blue at the bottom shows water under lower pressure and with lower concentrations of salt.

"You can see huge amounts of variation in the flow characteristics within the 3D membranes," Khara said. Most telling are the silver lines showing water moving around dense spots in the membrane.

"We're showing how water concentration changes across the membrane." Ganapathysubramanian said of the models, which required high-performance computing to solve. "This is beautiful. It has not been done before because such detailed 3D measurements were unavailable, and also because such simulations are non-trivial to perform."

"The simulations themselves posed computational challenges, as the diffusivity within an inhomogeneous membrane can differ by six orders of magnitude," added Khara.

So, the researchers conclude, the key to better desalination membranes is figuring out how to measure and control the densities of manufactured membranes at very small scales. Manufacturing engineers and materials scientists need to make the density uniform throughout the membrane, thus promoting water flow without sacrificing salt removal.

This is one more example of how computational work from Ganapathysubramanian's lab is helping to solve a very fundamental yet practical problem. "These simulations provided a lot of information for figuring out the key to making desalination membranes much more effective," said Ganapathysubramanian, whose work on the project was partly supported by two grants from the US National Science Foundation.

This story is adapted from material from Iowa State University, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.