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Wen's Research Group
Wen Zhang, Ph.D., P.E., BCEE
Principal Investigator
Professor
Phone: (973) 596-5520
Fax: (973) 596-5790
Email: wen.zhang@njit.edu
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NJIT researchers published a historical perspective article on functional catalytic membrane development
Recently, NJIT researchers led and contributed to a historical perspective article in the journal of Advances in Colloid and Interface Science.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001868620301950?dgcid=author
This article comprehensively examined the current state of catalyst coating techniques for functional or catalytic membrane development. Catalytic membranes combine catalytic activity with conventional filtration membranes, thus enabling diverse attractive benefits into the conventional membrane filtration processes, such as easy catalyst reuse, antifouling, anti-microbial, and enhancing process efficiency. Up to date, tremendous progresses have been made on functional catalytic membrane preparation and applications, which significantly advances the competitiveness of membrane technologies in process industries. This review article provides a critical and holistic overview of the current state of knowledge on existing catalyst coating techniques for functional catalytic membrane development. Advantages and drawbacks are also emphasized for different surface coating technologies. Future perspectives of the coating techniques are also highlighted to provide deep insights into their future developments. This historical perspective article not only provide a potential guide to new readers to this field, but also appeal to those directly involved in catalytic membrane area for rational design next generation smart catalytic membrane. The work is partially funded by the the U.S. Department of the Interior via Bureau of Reclamation (Agreement number: R19AC00106) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Agreement No. 83945101-0).
The leading author, Dr. Weihua Qing, is a chemical engineering postdoctoral research fellow working with Dr. Wen Zhang in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at NJIT. Both Dr. Qing and Zhang are research members of the Membrane Science, Engineering and Technology Center (MAST) at NJIT, which is an industrially funded NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) that focuses on membrane research and technologies.