About the Seminar

To address increasing environmental concerns, green and sustainable materials that promise to replace fossil-based separation materials, and reduce waste generation are attracting considerable research attention. On one hand, the monomers need to be reactive to form a highly crosslinked thin film. On the other hand, one of the monomers need to be soluble in polar solvents, while the other monomer need to be soluble in a non-polar solvent, which is immiscible with the selected polar solvent. Our group has been exploring various green sources to fabricate solvent-resistant nanofiltration membranes. The design of sustainable thin-film composite (TFC) membranes via interfacial polymerization of green building blocks will be presented. Approaches for bridging the gap between the polymer matrix and fillers in mixed matrix membranes (MMM) will be discussed.

We found that the separation performance of the membranes obtained from solely green sources was competitive to the fossil-based tailored and commercial membranes.

About the Speaker

Gyorgy is a Hungarian-British chemical engineer who received his MEng from the Technical University of Budapest, and his PhD from the Technical University of Dortmund under the European Commission’s Marie Curie Actions. He worked at Hovione PharmaScience Ltd in Portugal, and Imperial College London, and he was an IAESTE Fellow at the University of Tokyo. Gyorgy was appointed a Lecturer in Chemical Engineering, and then as Visiting Academic at The University of Manchester. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at the Advanced Membranes & Porous Materials Center at KAUST since 2019. The research interests of Gyorgy focus on sustainable separations through a combination of polymer and materials science, and process engineering. In particular, he has been devoted to address the challenges of sustainable fabrication of membrane materials for harsh environments, and expand the application of these membranes via process intensification. He has published over 120 articles, edited, written and contributed to more than 10 books. He serves on several editorial boards including Frontiers in Chemical Engineering, ACS Applied Polymer Materials, and the Journal of Membrane Science. Gyorgy is a Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and he was appointed a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in the UK. To learn more about the speaker and his group, visit www.szekelygroup.com.