Venkat Ganesan
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Engineering
Lithium for batteries, rare metals for motors and electronics — these critical minerals are in high demand, and a lot of them already sit dissolved in industrial waste and process water. The trouble is that pulling a specific ion out of a watery mixture is currently expensive, so most of that value is thrown away.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Chemistry
- Topics
polymer membranes
ion transport
ion selectivity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Use molecular simulations to determine how heterogeneity in a polymer network — pores and water-filled voids of varying size — controls the diffusion and sorption of ions in hydrated membranes.
- Model ion-specific interactions, including binding between target ions and ligands attached to the polymer, to explain how chemistry and structure jointly set ion selectivity.
- Connect simulation predictions to the collaboration's experiments that tune and quantify network heterogeneity, testing whether particular pore sizes improve recovery of critical-mineral ions from aqueous streams.
- Train K-12 science teachers and undergraduate researchers from Houston- and Austin-area community colleges in membrane separation technologies, including a hands-on outreach activity.
More about the research
Membranes offer a cheaper route: push water through a thin polymer film and let the film decide which ions pass. The catch is that polymer membranes are usually made by free radical polymerization, a reaction that produces a tangled network with pores and water-filled voids of all different sizes, and nobody really understands how that unevenness affects how ions move and which ones get through. This collaborative project combines experiments and computer simulations to deliberately tune that network structure and measure what it does to ion transport and selectivity.
Why it matters
Recovering critical minerals from waste and process streams depends on separations that are currently too costly to be worthwhile. Linking a membrane's internal pore structure and its ion-binding chemistry to how selectively it passes ions could guide the design of cheaper filtration-based recovery, supporting domestic supply of materials needed for batteries, motors and electronics, and reducing valuable material lost to waste streams.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Oishi Sanyal
West Virginia University, WV·Engineering·Early-career
Attach the natural enzyme laccase to lab-made polyelectrolyte membranes using several surface-anchoring techniques, creating a hybrid platform that breaks down the forever chemical PFOA in water.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
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