Location: Zoom 828-685-7838 : The video will be shown in CPE 2.222 at UT Austin.
Sponsor: Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) Materials for Water and Energy Systems (M-WET)
Title: Transport in Dense membranes: Coupling Solution-Diffusion with Mechanics
Abstract
Transport models have been instrumental to the development of membrane science and technology and related fields. The solution-diffusion (SD) model treats transport of both solvent and solutes as diffusive. SD has faithfully served the membrane community for over half a century, yet its validity for pressure-driven processes like reverse osmosis has been questioned recently, based on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. MD results for water transport in polyamide films display features seemingly inconsistent with SD and have been interpreted as an indication of a pore-flow (PF) mechanism. Using rigorously derived force-balance relations, we demonstrate that the discrepancies originate from different coupling of transport and mechanics in MD simulations and experiments.
Bio
Viatcheslav Freger received his M.Sc. in chemical engineering from the Mendeleyev Institute of Chemical Technology, Moscow (1988), and his Ph.D. from Ben-Gurion University, Israel (1999). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bath, UK (1999-2000), and was faculty at the Ben-Gurion University (2000-2011), and a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and UC Davis (2009-2010) and the University of Cambridge, UK (2023). Since 2011 he has been a Professor in the Wolfson Department of Chemical Engineering of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.Prof. Freger’s main interests are in the areas of membrane science and technology for water and energy applications, as well as polymers, surface science, electrochemistry, advanced materials, and fundamentals and modeling of membrane transport. He has authored over 100 scientific papers and book chapters, as well as several patents, and collaborated with industrial companies in Israel, the USA, and Germany.