Toward Tailored Nanocomposite Membranes for Specific Water Treatment Applications

Image
Portrait of Baolin Deng
Event Speaker
Baolin Deng
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Missouri
Event Type
CBEE Seminar
Date
Event Location
Johnson 102 and Zoom (https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/97565929648?pwd=cUloOTlXb0lQZzlENjErekpQT3lidz09) Password: CBEE
Event Description

One of the grand challenges afflicting human society is inadequate access to water resources with suitable water quality. Membrane water treatment is expected to play an increasingly important role in addressing the water challenge. In this presentation, we will discuss the development of advanced polymer-matrix nanocomposite membranes for water purification. The focus is to illustrate how membrane properties could be designed to meet specific applications and to probe the importance of porous structures in the membrane for the control of membrane performance. By exploiting a vast range of properties enabled by different nanomaterials, the nanocomposite membranes could be tailored to meet specific water treatment applications by tuning their structure and physicochemical properties (e.g., hydrophilicity, porosity, charge density, and thermal and mechanical stability) and introducing unique functionalities (e.g., antibacterial, photocatalytic, and adsorptive capabilities).
 

Speaker Biography

Dr. Baolin Deng is William Andrew Davidson Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Co-Director of the Missouri Water Center. He obtained his BS (Applied Chemistry) and MS (Geochemistry) from China University of Geosciences, and PhD in Environmental Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. Following a year of postdoctoral research in the US Air Force Research Laboratory as an NRC Research Associate, he started his independent academic career at New Mexico Tech, then moved to the University of Missouri in 2001. His research concerns with drinking water treatment, wastewater treatment and reuse by membrane filtration, and fundamental kinetics and mechanism of contaminant transformation in aquatic systems. He has also been exploring environmental applications of nanotechnology and evaluating the aquatic toxicity of nanomaterials since 2002. Deng has been PI/co-PI for over three dozen research projects including the NSF CAREER grant and published over 130 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Deng is Associate Editor/Asian regional editor for the AEESP journal – Environmental Engineering Science. Previously he served on the EPA Science Advisory Board Drinking Water Committee and chaired the MU Department of Chemical Engineering from 2009-2015.