By Dana Awad, Chemical Engineering Major, Mentor Dr. Allyson McGaughey. Lack of clean water is a challenging issue that people worldwide are suffering from. To increase clean water access, many techniques and technologies have been developed to extract clean water from contaminated streams, and membrane separation processes are critical for advanced water treatment applications. While many infographics have been developed to compare pressure-driven membrane processes, they do not include emerging processes that are currently being investigated by researchers. In this project, I develop an infographic that describes conventional and advanced membrane separation processes for use by water treatment plant operators and engineers who are new to the field of membrane separations. I categorize membrane processes in terms of their applicability to specific source waters, their ability to remove key contaminants, their relevance at different scales, and their energy efficiency and sustainability. This infographic communicates research results and technical information to engineers and other professionals in the water treatment industry in an interactive, creative, and meaningful way.
Through this fellowship, I want to introduce advanced membrane processes, what they are used for, the recent developments in these technologies, and how they compare for water treatment applications. In my infographic I will have two written sections; one that will be divided into figures and writing that compares advanced membrane processes using charts and tables. I will also have a section that focuses on membrane distillation, discussing briefly what membrane distillation is and its applications.
