This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project focuses on a new generation of materials with potential commercial and technological impact on filtration of proteins, viruses, pharmaceuticals and other sub-microscopic particles. Although it is intuitively obvious that any filtration material should have pores of all the same width (so as to achieve precise and reliable separations based on particle size) and also a high density of pores (for lower resistance and higher fluxes), there is an important particle size range over which no materials exist satisfying these fundamental requirements. Nature provides a certain type of liquid crystal -- a `lyotropic` liquid crystal -- that exhibits a very high degree of order and refinement at this scale size. It was first shown by a consultant on this project (Prof. David Anderson) that certain of these lyotropic liquid crystals can be converted to polymers, thus providing a new material that satisfies these two requirements. The Principal Investigator (Dr. Dongbin Zhang) has trained under Prof. Anderson and extended the range of chemistries afforded by these materials to include ultrafiltration materials with optimal porewall properties for minimizing adsorption. The purpose of the study is to produce membranes from these new materials using state-of-the-art ring opening metathesis polymerization catalysts, and to characterize their performance in ultrafiltration of proteins. The test results will include curves quantifying the sharp cut-off of protein separations based on the particle size (or molecular weight) and values of flux rates (or throughput), both of which are standard tests that will instantly convey the improved filtration performance of these materials compared with other materials currently available for similar uses.
