UB engineer awarded $312,359 NSF grant for bio-inspired membranes

For more than 60 years, synthetic separation membranes — manufactured barriers that selectively filter out unwanted substances in industrial, biomedical, desalination, gas separation and other processes — have been made the same way, using the same chemicals.

UB researcher Viviana Monje is part of a multi-institutional team that is looking to change the established paradigm and create new, biological-based membranes that can be made without the use of toxins.

She was recently awarded a $312,359 National Science Foundation grant — part of a larger $2 million initiative with researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Air Force Research Lab — that takes inspiration from how human cells allow some small molecules to enter through the cell wall while filtering others out.

“New and improved membranes can lead to cleaner, more efficient and sustainable operations in everything from water treatment to gas separation and pharmaceutical manufacturing,” says Monje, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “By using both experimental and modeling techniques, we hope to inform the design of membranes with improved stability, cost and selectivity to create solutions that address water purification, climate change, manufacturing costs and more.”

Two of Monje’s collaborators are Jessica Schiffman, professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, and Sarah Perry, UMass Amherst professor of chemical engineering who is the project’s principal investigator.

The project’s goal, Perry says, is to change the paradigm of how membranes are created, harnessing biology-like selectivity and the chemical versatility of synthetic membranes.

“We are hoping that we could do this entirely from water, just the way that cells do,” she says. “It’s a really interesting challenge to figure out how to do this because all these pieces exist but nobody’s put them together. And that’s what our team is looking to do.”

In a cell, the membrane is made of molecules called lipids, together with specialized proteins. “We want to take advantage of the ability of lipids to arrange themselves into different structures on a molecular level. However, just as the membranes of cells require specialized proteins, we want to use carefully designed natural polymers to help stabilize the resulting membranes and tune what can or cannot pass through,” says Perry.

One of the big challenges in approaching this kind of molecular-level materials design is the number of possible permutations. “It would be impossible for us to test every single possible lipid molecule and polymer,” says Perry. In addition to running experiments in the lab, this project will use computer simulations to test how different molecules interact.

Monje says her lab will use modeling and machine learning to “determine the forces and chemical features that drive lipid-polyelectrolyte self-assembly — an exciting new field for the group.”

“Our models will produce data to compliment experimental measurements as input features for a machine learning model that will use molecular chemical diversity and structural characteristics to rationally engineer membranes for separations with targeted selectivity, transport and mechanics” she adds.

Ultimately, the researchers aim to create a foundational platform to enable scientists to generate a membrane specifically tuned to filter out the desired material, with a broad range of applications. Within water purification, such membranes could be used for desalination and water treatment of various pollutants.