(353e) Environmentally Relevant Separations and Db's Place

The Area of Environmentally Relevant Separations and DB’s Place in it

Abstract

 Several kinds of tough separation problems are encountered in situations of environmental interests.  Such separations may be motivated either by purification of a stream or isolating a desirable species from the bulk.  One type of tough problem, such as carbon capture from flue gases from power plants, is merely because of huge scale of operation in which economic considerations dominate.  Another type is removing extremely low concentration of toxic components from a stream, such as arsenic from drinking water sources.  Yet another type is recovering minute quantities of products from a much larger bulk of fluid, for example, isolating lipids for biodiesels from largely watery stream.  Traditional low-cost separation methods of absorption, adsorption, membranes, and even distillation are the typical avenues with innovations to fit the purpose.  DB, the researcher has had an impact in most of these approaches to devise methods that qualify as candidates for commercial considerations.  The author has observed several innovations in DB’s research that cleverly used membranes in various configurations where multi-functionality of ligands, sometimes aided by induced chemical reactions were employed to solve these tough problems.  This presentation is about the author’s eye witness account of that story.