UK researchers lead team that produced breed of polymer nanomembranes

In the UK, a team from Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London (UK), Northwestern University in Evanston (USA) and Bielefeld University (D) have produced a new breed of polymer nanomembranes with aligned supramolecular macrocycle molecules. These new nanomembranes demonstrate properties that promise to improve the efficiency of separation processes widely used across the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.  

Conventional chemical and pharmaceutical industries use 45-55% of their total energy consumption during production in molecular separations. In order to make these processes more efficient, cost-effective, environmentally friendly and therefore sustainable, these processes need to be partially or wholly replaced by novel separation strategies that make use of innovative and ground-breaking membrane technologies. 

Publishing their results in the journal Nature, the team show that their polymer nanomembranes with aligned supramolecular macrocycles exhibit superb and extremely selective filtration properties that exceed the conventional polymer nanomembranes currently used across the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Conventional polymer nanomembranes have a broad distribution of the pore size that lacks a controllable way to be precisely tuned.