Clean Water Showcase

Oregon’s economic advantage must be founded on sustainable, affordable, and efficient water management, based on disparate groups sharing the responsibility to find workable solutions to make necessary adaptions of our water management system. A more resilient Oregon natural system will be founded on encouraging and rewarding innovative solutions to multiple water management challenges, reduces compliance and enforcement costs, provides greater protections for our most critical natural resource, and ensures that all Oregonians have access to affordable, quality water. Whether or not we can achieve this vision for a more resilient Oregon will depend in large measure of the hard work and leadership of the Oregon legislature and Office of Governor.

I will begin this talk with a brief overview of past and ongoing food-energy-water nexus research in the UCLA Nanomaterials, Membrane & Electrochemical Technologies Research (NanoMETeR) Lab, including a few attempts to translate basic research discoveries into commercial innovations.

Then, I will present new results––both experimental and theoretical––on a new class of fully thermoset reverse osmosis (RO) membrane materials designed to operate at extreme temperatures and pressures. Conventional RO membranes comprise an ultra-thin, microporous cross-linked (thermoset) polyamide (PA) film formed over a mesoporous polysulfone (PSU) (thermoplastic) support membrane, which is cast over a macroporous nonwoven polyester fabric. The thermoplastic PSU supports experience permanent deformation and damage via plastic creep when exposed to high applied pressure (>50 bar) and/or feed solution temperature (>30 ºC), while the thermoset PA layer physically compacts under pressure, but recovers its original free volume upon pressure relief.

We have employed advanced modeling methods such as density functional theory, molecular dynamic simulations and a novel “material point method” along with traditional wet-testing experiments and ex situ light and electron microscopy plus novel X-ray computed tomography (CT) and focused ion beam-electron microscopy CT to elucidate the fundamental mechanical properties and resulting performance characteristics of conventional and fully thermoset RO membranes.

These new high-pressure/-temperature tolerant RO membranes can serve applications that have long been exclusively in the domain of thermal technologies. If scalable, RO membrane-based solutions could be half the capital cost and half the energy demand of traditional thermal-based separation processes.

The World Health Organization estimated that about 11% of the world’s population does not have access to clean water and about 1.6 million deaths are caused by contaminated water annually. Even though there are diverse water treatment technologies available today, they are not widely distributed or suitable for all geographic locations and types of water contamination because they have different treatment efficiencies and costs.

Furthermore, as our understanding of the environmental and health effects of diverse contaminants evolve with advanced analytical technologies, we have been able to identify new emerging contaminants, such as antibiotics, healthcare products, and others, that cannot be easily treated with the current wastewater and water treatment methods.

In developing countries, the treatment of water is even more complicated due to a lack of infrastructure for water and sanitation, low levels of water security, and a lack of funding to support water treatment technologies. This issue has caused more than one billion people in developing countries to have inadequate access to clean water.

Since I came from a developing country, my career goal has been to identify and develop novel technologies that are affordable to treat different water contaminants. In my research group, we have investigated both biotechnologies and alternative technologies to treat simultaneously diverse types of water contaminants.

Ultimately, my research group goal is to identify or even combine complementary technologies to enhance water treatment to better remove simultaneously diverse contaminants from water in an affordable manner to help reduce the water crises in developing countries.