@article{85fe7d630fc64c2fa163440666ed5d65,
title = "Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticle Membranes with Controllable Free Volume",
abstract = "Polymer-based membranes play a key role in several industrially important gas separation technologies, e.g., removing CO2 from natural gas, with enormous economic and environmental impact. Here, we develop a novel hybrid membrane construct comprised entirely of nanoparticles grafted with polymers. These membranes are shown to have broadly tunable separation performance through variations in graft density and chain length. Computer simulations show that the optimal NP packing forces the grafted polymer layer to distort, yielding regions of measurably lower polymer density. Multiple experimental probes confirm that these materials have the predicted increase in {"}polymer free volume{"}, which explains their improved separation performance. These polymer-grafted NP materials thus represent a new template for rationally designing membranes with desirable separation abilities coupled with improved aging characteristics in the glassy state and enhanced mechanical behavior.",
author = "Bilchak, {Connor R.} and Eileen Buenning and Makoto Asai and Kai Zhang and Durning, {Christopher J.} and Kumar, {Sanat K.} and Yucheng Huang and Benicewicz, {Brian C.} and Gidley, {David W.} and Shiwang Cheng and Sokolov, {Alexei P.} and Matteo Minelli and Ferruccio Doghieri",
note = "Funding Information: Partial financial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (EB: grant # DGE-11-44155; CRB: grant #DGE-16-44869), the NSF DMREF program (CBET-16929502(SK)) and DMR-1507030 (SK,KZ). This material is partially based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists, Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program (EB). The SCGSR program is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the DOE under Contract DE-AC05-06OR23100. B.C.B. and Y.H. acknowledge support from the SC SmartState program. The SANS results were performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories (grant # IPTS-13903.1). SAXS experiments were performed through the South Carolina SAXS Collaborative, supported by the NSF Major Research Instrumentation program (Award #DMR-1428620). S.C. and A.P.S. acknowledge support by DOE, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Science & Engineering Division. Some of this work was initiated when F.D. was visiting Columbia Universitywe thank the University of Bologna and Columbia University for partially supporting this visit. E.B. and C.R.B. thank Dr. Dustin Janes for his assistance with QCM experiments. E.B. thanks Jiahua Zhu for assistance with transmission electron microscopy and Halie Martin for assistance with pycnometry experiments. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 American Chemical Society.",
year = "2017",
month = sep,
day = "26",
doi = "10.1021/acs.macromol.7b01428",
language = "English",
volume = "50",
pages = "7111--7120",
journal = "Macromolecules",
issn = "0024-9297",
publisher = "American Chemical Society",
number = "18",
}