2025 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium NM03-Selective Separations in Nanomaterials

This symposium will cover the latest advances in understanding selective transport in nanomaterial-based pores, channels, and membranes. This will focus on multidisciplinary aspects; exploring the emerging synthetic techniques to prepare nanomaterials for selective and energy-efficient separations; engineering of nanomaterials in the state-of-the-art separation technologies including aspects of scale-up; fundamentals of solid-fluid interactions at the nanoscale including elucidation of transport modes and mechanisms; developing computational approaches which link nanoscale interactions to macroscopic properties like the pore permeability and solute selectivity; novel applications of these nanomaterials for separation technologies, etc.
Industrial, chemical, and biomedical separations are one of the cornerstones of the world economy, impacting everything from large-scale water desalination to carbon capture, to kidney dialysis, to precision separations of pharmaceuticals. As the current industrial landscape is dominated by polymer membranes with intrinsic limits on selective transport, further development of selective separations requires precise control of the transport mechanisms, pore dimensions, and functionality. Nanoscale materials, which allow researchers to construct many types of 0D, 1D, and 2D channels at multiple length and size scales, could reduce the energy requirements of separation and potentially enable a new era of precision separations. Further, understanding these nanoscale systems often requires a multiscale modeling approach, combining quantum chemical and classical molecular dynamics simulations, continuum theory, and data-driven methods. This symposium will showcase the latest research in nanomaterials for separations spanning fundamental mechanisms, modeling advancements, and real-world applications.

Topics will include:

Scale-up fabrication approaches for 1D and 2D material membranes
Transport properties of 1D nanotube channels and 2D materials-based membranes
Biomimetic and bioinspired membranes & membrane processes
MOF and COF-based materials for selective separations
Nanomaterials for rare earths and heavy metals separation
Nanomaterials for water desalination and nanofiltration
Nanomaterials for biological separations
Nanomaterials for carbon capture and gas separations
Lithium & proton separation for powers
Development of advanced modeling to describe fluid-nanomaterial interactions
Computational insights into transport in 1D and 2D nanomaterials

Invited Speakers:

Narayana Aluru (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Martin Bazant (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Lydéric Bocquet (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France)
Radha Boya (The University of Manchester, United Kingdom)
Yunfei Chen (Southeast University, China)
Seth Darling (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Chuanhua Duan (Boston University, USA)
Slaven Garaj (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Jia Geng (Sichuan University, China)
Sheng Hu (Xiamen University, China)
Rohit Karnik (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Barbara Kirchner (Universität Bonn, Germany)
Yuhao Li (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)
Chong Liu (The University of Chicago, USA)
Ryan P. Lively (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Mainak Majumder (Monash University, Australia)
Aleksandr Noy (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)
Hyung Gyu Park (Pohang University of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)
Aleksandra Radenovic (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
Ananth Rajan (Indian Institute of Science, India)
Andrea Iris Shafer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Michael Strano (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Luda Wang (Peking University, China)
Miao Yu (University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA)
Huacheng Zhang (RMIT University, Australia)
Sui Zhang (National University of Singapore, Singapore)