1. Conferences.
The International Congress on Membranes and Membrane Processes, ICOM 2017 was attended by SynFabFun researchers in August, with several key papers presented - ICOM17-papers.
An exciting announcement was that the next ICOM would be held in the UK - ICOM2020 – arranged after negotiations between the SynFabFun Management Board and the organisers Elsevier.
2. Events.
The SynFabFun programme has been selected by EPSRC to be one of just 12 research exhibits at the Science for a Successful Nation 2018 event being held at the Royal Society on 21st February 2018. SynFabFun is providing an exhibit with the title, “Membranes for low energy water purification.” The exhibition provides a showcase of EPSRC’s portfolio, promoting the importance of EPSRC investments, in the context of UK prosperity.
The UK Membranes showcase will be held in Manchester on the 13th & 14th June 2018 at the National Graphene Institute – event poster. Further details will be available in early 2018.
3. People
The SynFabFun project welcomes a new member to its Advisory Board – Dr Dhaval Bhandari of ExxonMobil Engineering Research (EMRE). Dhaval is a Senior Researcher and Project Leader focussed on developing disruptive concepts for low-energy refinery and petrochemical separations. He previously worked at General Electric (GE) Global Research on a range of materials development projects.
New researchers have joined the project this autumn – Dr Saeed Mazinani at Bath University and Dr Liu Qu at Newcastle University – respectively focussed on polymeric and ceramic based systems.
4. Publications
Two of the latest publications from the research are:
“Polymer ultrapermeability from the inefficient packing of 2D chains”, Nature Materials, Vol 16, Sept 2017, pp932-937.
“Composite CO2 separation membranes: Insights on kinetics and stability”, J. Membrane Sci, 541, 2017, pp253-261.
The SynFabFun web-site gives a full record of relevant publications.
5. Project progress
The Mid-Term Review of the programme was delivered to EPSRC in October 2017, and reviewers’ observations are expected in early 2018.
A stage gate-process for projects for the second half of the programme grant was completed over the summer. The Advisory Board was asked to review 14 project proposals and 13 were approved, a mixture of continuation and new topics, with a range of low and higher risk activities.
Last modified: Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:41:25 GMT