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The Perfect Membrane: ENVR 400 In-house Seminar

March 6, 2019 @ 12:20 pm - 1:10 pm

Mikayla Armstrong, doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Engineering, will present this week’s seminar in the department’s Spring 2019 series. Armstrong’s talk is titled, “Pursuing the perfect membrane: Strategies to decrease pollutant passage.”

Abstract: Synthetic membranes are an attractive technology to implement at interfaces between humans and the environment because their implementation is relatively simplistic compared to technologies that use chemical additives. For example, membrane technology is used extensively in medical (e.g., safe blood donations, intravenous fluid delivery, kidney dialysis), food (e.g., carbonated drinks, production of whey and juices), textiles (e.g., waterproofing), energy generation (e.g., fuel cells), and water/wastewater purification industries (e.g., seawater desalination, water reuse). Membranes are ideal for many applications because they are comprised of polymers with unique physical and chemical properties. In water purification processes, size and charge exclusion are two physical mechanisms responsible for removing contaminants of interest. As such, pressure-driven membrane separation processes poorly remove small, neutral contaminants. Two neutral contaminants that occur naturally in the environment and are of concern to human and environmental health are trivalent arsenic and boric acid, respectively. Trivalent arsenic contaminates well water and results in adverse health outcomes when ingested orally by humans. Boric acid present in water reuse sources treated for irrigation is toxic for crops. This seminar will focus on two strategies I am exploring to enhance the ability of membranes to remove neutral contaminants. The first strategy employs new insights of the chemical process utilized to fabricate membranes and the second leverages the relative strengths of different membrane materials to design a hybrid membrane more effective than either of the parent materials.

Details

Date:
March 6, 2019
Time:
12:20 pm - 1:10 pm
Event Categories:
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Location

2301 McGavran-Greenberg Hall
McGavran-Greenberg Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27516 United States
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