Highly Water Permeable Anti-Fouling Coatings for Water Purification Membranes

Water is a constrained resource today and will likely become more of a concern in the future as the world population grows. This global water crisis has lead to great interest in improved water purification technologies and innovative materials for water treatment. Here at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, the materials, processes and computational models originally developed for nanotechnology are currently being leveraged for application in desalination and water purification. For example, in partnership with the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST, Saudi Arabia) and the University of Texas-Austin (Professor Benny Freeman, US), we have developed highly water-permeable coating materials that demonstrate significant anti-fouling efficiency during ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) processes which are widely used for waste water and drinking water treatment. In the presentation, bifunctional hydrogel materials designed for porous UF membranes, and ultra-thin hydrophilic methacrylate polymers designed for dense RO membranes will be introduced. The materials showed excellent antifouling efficiency in cross-flow filtration tested using an oil-water emulsion or a bovine serum albumin (BSA) solution as the feed. The antimicrobial activity of the anti-fouling materials was also demonstrated by a case study employing E-coli.