CREATE Fellowship: Developing Transformative Membrane Filters

By Luca Mazzaferro

Billions of people drink contaminated water. This is one of the leading causes of severe water-borne diseases that lead to 502,000 deaths each year and heavily burden healthcare systems, accounting for up to 80% of all hospitalizations in some regions in the world. Therefore, clean, safe, and affordable drinking water is a critical resource for public health and environmental sustainability. In recent decades, an increasing number of world regions are suffering from water scarcity. Thus, developing new technologies that enable cheaper, more efficient water treatment and reuse are in great demand.

Membranes are expected to play a progressively more significant role in providing clean drinking water from natural resources such as surface water (lakes, rivers, streams) and ground water (wells, aquifers). Membrane filters are more economic, energy efficient, and produce higher quality and more reliable effluent than most other water purification methods. However, current commercial membranes are not equipped with the required properties to perform many of these separations in an effective and enduring manner. This is largely due to fouling, the accumulation of unwanted material on the membrane surface and pores, which leads to lower productivity, declining effectiveness, and shorter membrane life cycle.

My Ph.D. research focuses on developing transformative membrane filters to improve water treatment outcomes. In 2021, we developed a novel, versatile, and scalable membrane material with great potential for water treatment applications. Our preliminary results indicated that our membranes were promising solutions for efficient, reliable surface and ground water treatment. During summer 2022, the Tufts CREATE Fellowship enabled me to work on an interdisciplinary project that translated this work to applications with direct impact on water access and sustainability. In this project, we tested the capabilities of these newly developed membranes in treating surface and ground water.

To access the capabilities of our membranes we filtered solutions containing different combinations of commonly found foulants in surface and ground water, like oils, proteins, organics, and polysaccharides. All of our membranes showed excellent fouling resistance with no significant irreversible fouling when testing any of the fouling solutions. We also compared our membrane performance with a commonly used commercial membrane. The commercial membrane suffered from significant irreversible fouling when testing any of the fouling solutions. These results demonstrated that our membranes are excellent candidates for cheap and reliable surface and ground water treatment. The extreme fouling resistance capabilities of our technology come from the highly hydrated surface and pores of our membranes, making it energetically unfavorable for molecules to attach to the surface and decrease performance.

The Tufts CREATE Fellowship was a highly interdisciplinary experience. My advisor, Professor Asatekin (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering), and I had to combine our polymer science knowledge when developing our polymers with chemical engineering principles to ensure successful filtration experiments. Moreover, we benefited from the expertise of my co-advisor on this project, Professor Lantagne (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering), on water treatment and public health. As we were finalizing the study, we decided to collaborate with Professor Kaplan (Department of Biomedical Engineering) on a project to address the recycling of cellular agriculture media, an extremely challenging application, where solutions with thousands of different biological molecules need to be filtered and purified. Our membranes showed extreme promise, with no change in performance after the fouling test, while the commercial membrane had a 91% decrease in performance.

Throughout the Tufts CREATE experience I have recognized the great potential of our technology, not only to tackle pollution and water scarcity, but also to help advance technological developments in different industries. The food industry is a great example where membranes can address key challenges, particularly with the expansion of cellular agriculture and more complex industrial processes. Currently, we are witnessing a biofabrication revolution that will most likely change how we manufacture foods, pharmaceuticals, fabrics, and many other materials. As this revolution moves forward, the need for cheap, versatile, and reliable membranes to treat industrial wastewater or separate valuable components will only rise.

In the past decade, we have also witnessed many developed countries struggle with water scarcity, from the low waters of the Colorado River in the American Southwest to stricter water usage restrictions in the EU and Australia. Water scarcity, a problem that was uncommon in the developed world, is now garnering international attention. We must act now. I am excited to continue my work developing new materials with the goal of improving livelihoods worldwide.

Luca Mazzaferro is a PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at Tufts University.