Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. Chen Zhang, University of Maryland (CHBE)
Friday, October 28, 2022
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301 405 1935
plorenza@umd.edu
Polymer-Derived Inorganic Membranes for Sustainable Separations and Beyond
ABSTRACT: Membrane separations can replace or debottleneck thermally driven separations in petrochemical production, oil refining, and water treatment with reduced CO 2 emission and enhanced sustainability. Inorganic membranes can provide outstanding separation performance; they, however, have yet gained large-scale application owing to low compatibility with scalable membrane geometry such as hollow fiber. In this seminar, I will present polymer-derived inorganic hollow fiber membranes, which are made from polymer hollow fiber templates or precursors. I will first present hierarchically porous petrified hollow fiber membranes derived from polymer hollow fiber templates. This will be followed by a discussion of sustainable hydrogen separation and alkane conversion by carbon molecular sieve hollow fiber membranes derived from polymer hollow fiber precursors.
BIO: Chen Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also did post-doctoral research. He joined the faculty of University of Maryland in 2018 and is directing the Sustainable Separations Lab. His present research interests are focused on polymer and nanoporous membranes, sorbents, and hollow fiber membrane reactors. He received the NSF CAREER Award and the ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award in 2021.
