The Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems (M-WET) is a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), a basic research program funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) that brings together creative, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional team of scientific researchers to address the toughest grand scientific challenges at the forefront of fundamental energy science research.
Synthetic polymer membranes are widely used to purify water, mainly because they are more energy efficient than competing (e.g., thermally based) technologies. However, water in energy applications is often heavily contaminated with a plethora of diverse organic and inorganic components. Current membranes were not designed (and are unsuitable) for such applications. Basic science knowledge gaps in thermodynamic and kinetic behavior of complex aqueous mixtures at interfaces, and the effect of such mixtures on the interfacial properties, limit our ability to translate fundamental understanding to transformative membrane materials design and manufacturing for energy/water applications. Moreover, current methods for synthesis and precision assembly of novel materials far from equilibrium do not allow for the scalable manufacturing of membranes with mesoscopic control over morphology for highly selective decontamination or resource recovery from such complex aqueous mixtures. The Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems (M-WET) will fill these gaps in the understanding of fluids, materials, and nonequilibrium processing to catalyze the design of novel materials, highly selective solute/fluid interactions, mesoscopic structures, and transformative manufacturing strategies to prepare robust, high-performance membranes for energy applications.
