SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will provide new opportunities for purifying waters that cannot be economically treated using existing commercial membranes. Increased market growth to include recycle and re-use of contaminated water that is currently slated for disposal or long term environmentally risky storage will increase water availability for industry and agriculture and reduce environmental impact from these same users. More available water, especially in higher demand locations, will lead to higher production and lower costs for industrial and agriculture based consumers, leading to job growth.This SBIR Phase I project proposes to validate a new method of thin film composite membrane fabrication using new materials strategies to produce game changing anti-fouling and chlorine resistant reverse osmosis membranes. Current market dominating polyamide thin film composite (TFC) membranes are inherently susceptible to fouling and degraded by chlorine disinfectants used to mitigate bio-fouling, which is the greatest challenge to membrane operation. The established TFC production technique provides very thin active layers on the order of 100?s of nanometers but is limited to polyamides. The proposed technology will produce TFCs with alternative polymers. Polymers that are chlorine resistant and inherently non-fouling are targeted for use but the unmet challenge has been the opportunity to manufacture them with membrane thicknesses down to the 100?s of nm thickness regime necessary to challenge the flux properties of current commercial membranes. Combining this new fabrication technology and new polymers is the technological breakthrough needed to develop innovative membranes. The project will synthesize a target polymer composition, develop the formulation and fabrication parameters within the new process and produce TFC samples for testing. TFC samples will undergo comparative testing of fouling and chlorine resistance, water flux and salt rejection in a variety of simulated test waters.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This SBIR Phase II project will develop breakthrough polymeric membranes to purify water by reverse osmosis. It will address the recognized global need for clean drinking water driven by increasing population and urbanization that affect billions of people living in water-stressed lands. The impurities in water from different geographical locations and different types of water (e.g., seawater, industrial wastewater, tap water reuse) differ, and separation membranes that can selectively remove different combinations of impurities will be critical to addressing this world challenge. The technology provides a means to greatly eliminate costly cleaning operations and minimize plant downtime in this ~$5 billion market. Industrial and Enhanced energy and operating efficiency will be achieved through reduced required pretreatment and enhanced fouling resistance, leading to extended use cycles and improved water flux over the lifetime of the membranes. This SBIR Phase II project will produce thin film composite reverse osmosis (RO) membranes comprised of precisely sulfonated polysulfone polymers in the ~100-nm thick range on a porous support. These novel membranes will provide a long sought after revolution in water purification membranes with their high resistance to chlorine for disinfection and ability to prevent biofouling. For the first time, they will also efficiently remove monovalent salts that contaminate seawater and brackish water from their mixed salt compositions. Sulfonated polysulfones have been considered previously for RO membranes due to their inherent chemical resistance, but they failed due to low salt rejection at high ionic strengths and their inferiority in salt rejections in mixed salt feedwater. Municipal water requirements are high and their process water is often contaminated with toxic products (boron and arsenic moieties, hydrocarbons, perfluorinated surfactants, biofilms), making reuse difficult to impossible technically and economically. This project advances material synthesis and material processing through precisely sulfonated polymers. Phase II will take advantage of these advances to optimize the membrane coating process, scale it to pilot quantities, and measure resistance to a range of impurities found in tap water reuse, industrial water purification, as well as in purification of brackish surface and groundwater and highly saline seawater.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.