Separating chemical mixtures currently consumes more than half of all energy and capital costs in industrial processing, often requiring boiling liquids into gases or using vast amounts of solvents. A new generation of membranes—thin, selective barriers—could slash those costs by letting desired molecules pass through while blocking others, without heat or dilution. This matters because most membranes degrade in organic liquids like crude oil or pharmaceutical solvents, limiting their use to water-based separations such as desalination. Researchers at Imperial College have already developed solvent-stable membranes, commercialised through spin-out company Membrane Extraction Technology (acquired by Evonik Industries in 2010), and built a large-scale manufacturing facility in West London. But the underlying materials—nanoporous structures with precisely controlled pores—have not yet been assembled into practical devices for real industrial separations. If successful, this project will turn those advanced materials into working columns, monoliths, and modules. That could enable continuous pharmaceutical synthesis, production of DNA and RNA for therapies, and gas separation—applications current membranes cannot reach. The team will acquire new fabrication and assembly skills through collaborations at Imperial and internationally, aiming to create world-leading science and new UK-manufactured products.
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Separations demand more than half of all the capital and operating costs associated with processing industries. This is because separation is often achieved by boiling liquids to make them turn into a gas, or by diluting systems with large volumes of solvents and carrying out differential adsorption in a chromatography systems. These approaches are resource intensive and complex. Membranes might be used to simplify these problems. If a mixture of materials is pressed by pressure against a membrane, and the membrane is permeable to only some of the materials, then we can separate the molecules that pass through the membrane from those that do not. This uses much less solvents and energy, and is less complex than alternatives. Not surprisingly, people have been interested in using membranes to separate and concentrate molecules for some time. A major success is in the area of desalination, where membranes are used to separate fresh water out of seawater. However, membranes are not generally used to separate organic mixtures, like crude oil, into its components, because there were no membranes stable in organic liquids. This has changed recently - research at Imperial College, supported by the platform grant "Molecular Builders: Constructing Nanoporous Materials" has developed membranes that are stable in most solvents, and offer high throughput rates and selectivity between molecules. These have been commercialised through an Imperial spin out company, Membrane Extraction technology, who began production on a small scale. This generated interest from large companies, who saw the potential for widespread use, and MET was acquired by Evonik Industries on 1 March 2010. Evonik MET made a substantial investment in a large scale manufacturing facility in West London, and the UK has become a world leader in the development and manufacture of advanced Organic Solvent Nanofiltration (OSN) membranes. Now, we need to build on this initial success. We have developed innovative new materials with controlled micro-porous structure that lead to outstanding performance. But we have not yet developed the skills and knowledge to put these into devices and to use these devices in molecular separations that would be applicable in commerce and industry. For the platform grant renewal period, we will revolutionise the device fabrication and application platforms. We will use the techniques we have created to manufacture composite materials and incorporate these into micro-devices such as columns, monoliths and modules. We will use the these devices to deal with separation problems that current membranes cannot reach, such as synthesis of pharmaceuticals in continuously operating reactors, production of DNA and RNA for therapeutic needs, and the separation of gases. To succeed in this ambitious goal we will need to train our research team in a diverse range of techniques, most of which we do not have currently. We will do this by working with other research teams at Imperial College and around the world who are experts in the techniques we want to learn, and by hiring new post-docs into our team from these groups, who will speed skills transfer. The synthesis of the new techniques, and their combination with our existing skills, will lead to world beating new science and engineering, and new products manufactured in the UK.
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