On 4-6 March 2024 the 9th International Conference on Organic Solvent Nanofiltration was held at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST, Saudi Arabia). This event aims to gather leading experts, researchers, and industry pioneers from around the globe that present and discuss the latest advancements, discoveries, and applications in the field of organic solvent nanofiltration membranes and applications.
Jadwiga Poniatowska – PhD student in the MMP group - won the European Membrane Society (EMS) Best Poster Award with her poster ‘Dynamic covalent bonds for fabrication of recyclable OSN membranes’. Jadwiga works on the ARC-CBBC project New Chemistry for a Sustainable Future: Circular polymer organic solvent nanofiltration membranes for polar/non-polar separations. In her work, dynamic covalent bonds (specifically furan-maleimide Diels-Alder (DA) cycloadducts) are used as a new approach to crosslinking of OSN membranes to obtain membranes which are simultaneously highly stable and recyclable. She showed the concept and proofed that closed-loop recovery of materials and fabrication of recycled membranes with similar performances after multiple cycles is possible. This in contrast with typical covalently crosslinked polyimide membranes which cannot be reprocessed after loss of performance/fouling. Currently she further elaborates on tuning the membrane morphology and the operational performance window of these novel high-performance, recyclable, green PAI-FU-BMI membranes as platform for truly sustainable membrane separations.