Understanding Design Principles in Weakly Charged Polyacrylic Acid-Based Polymer Membranes at Varying External pH
Restricted (Penn State Only)
Author:
Szymanski, Jack
Area of Honors:
Chemical Engineering
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Hee Jeung Oh, Thesis Supervisor Darrell Velegol, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Ion Transport Water Transport Polymers Water Uptake Membranes Sustainability Separation Decarbonization Energy Environment Health
Abstract:
A fundamental understanding of ion and water transport in changed polymer membranes is important in sustainable separation processes with environmental, energy, and health applications. It is essential for the advancement of polymer electrolyte technology in water desalination, electrodialysis, batteries, artificial kidneys, drug capture, and more. Recent studies in the field have faced challenges establishing systematic relationships between polymer properties and transport properties. These studies required multiple polymer formulations of differing chemical structures to control crucial transport properties such as water uptake (wu) and charged group concentration (C_c^m). In this experiment, we designed a system utilizing weakly charged polyacrylic acid polymers and varying pH so that we could achieve similar studies of these crucial transport properties but in a single polymer structure and at the same time. This thesis provides experimental methods and ion and water transport data of multiple weakly charged polyacrylic acid polymers subjected to titration experiments with 0.1M NaOH in deionized (DI) water to improve knowledge in the field of energy-efficient separation.