FURI | Fall 2023

3D Printing of Membranes with Bioinspired Porous Structures for Water Treatment

With limited water resources readily available it is pertinent to discover new ways of filtering water to provide clean water resources to communities. To filter water more efficiently these processes were tested. Polymerization induced phase separation is a process that takes a small monomer of a liquid crystal and combines chemically to form a bigger chainlike crosslinked liquid crystal. These crosslinked liquid crystals leave pores after exposure to light creating high hierarchical porous structures. The light gives the liquid crystals the ability to rotate the plane of polarized light to aid in the 3D printing of these structures.