The Livingston Group from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London perform research on the fabrication and application of molecular separation membranes with the overarching aim to reduce energy costs and increase efficiency of chemical separations in industry.
At Imperial Festival 2016 the group demonstrated the power of membranes to purify water by comparing the bicycle driven energy needed to purify water through distillation vs membrane purification ... the membrane bike won!

Professor Andrew Livingston's webinar on Membranes for Separating Molecules. Held on 8 December 2016.

Watch to find out the latest advances on why membranes hold the key to reducing energy use, how to make membranes, using them for desalination, nanofiltration in organic liquids and the future of separation membranes.

Abstract

Membranes have had a huge impact on molecular separations in aqueous systems, especially for desalination where they can be used to separate water and salt. This can be achieved with far lower energy consumption than multiple effect evaporation, and so the Reverse Osmosis (RO) process using membranes has become well established.

It is generally accepted that 40-70% of capital and operating costs in industries from refining to pharmaceuticals are dedicated to separations; and a substantial fraction of this cost is related to processing of organic liquids. Membrane technology has the potential to also provide game changing alternatives for the processing of organic liquids, in the same way that it has done for aqueous systems.

This webinar described why membranes have been so successful in RO, how polymer membranes are made, and what the current challenges for aqueous RO membranes are. It then outlined some of the research being undertaken at Imperial College London to develop new membranes, for RO and for molecular separations in organic systems.

Find out about the group's ground-breaking work published in Science. Find out more

Making sheet membranes with Marcus Cook from the Livingston group. Find out more at http://www.imperial.ac.uk/livingston-group

In this audio story, Professor Andrew Livingston gives listeners the low-down on membranes and how they are used to make many products we need in our daily lives. He also carries out ‘frontier’ research, where he is pushing the boundaries membranes usage forward. He and his team have developed membranes that are made from nanoscopic, twisted, fusilli-like material. He talks about how industries such as the oil and gas sector could be the big winners by adopting this technology, which in the future could cut their emissions and save energy.

Patrizia Marchetti, research associate, Imperial College London – UK

Patrizia holds a BSc (2007) and MSc (2009) in chemical engineering from the Politecnico of Milan, Italy. She obtained her PhD degree under Marie Curie Actions from Imperial College London (2013). Her work at Imperial has been sponsored by Lanxess, a German polymer and specialty chemicals group, and more recently by GSK.

Her research activity covers the fields of pharmaceutical downstream, peptide chemistry, membrane-based separation processes, functional and nano-scale materials and advanced nanoparticle assembly, transport and process modelling.

Patrizia’s research achievements have resulted in several research articles and reviews in international scientific journals, two book chapters, a patent application and numerous presentations at renowned international conferences.

Separation membranes with ultrafast solvent permeance and high retention of dissolved solutes are needed to reduce the energy consumed by separations in organic liquids. Researchers used controlled interfacial polymerisation to form sub-10 nm thick free-standing polyamide nanofilms, and used these as the separating layer of composite membranes. The nanofilms can withstand pressurised filtration and achieve permeance two orders of magnitude higher than commercially-available equivalents. Dr Santanu Karan discusses the group's latest publication in Science.