Abstract

Water and energy are among the vital elements for human activities. With a vast amount available, wastewater has been receiving attention as a potential source of water and energy. However, the complex composition of wastewater makes it difficult to harvest water and energy through conventional separation technologies.

I present emerging membrane-based separation processes that utilize vapor-phase transport to effectively recover water and energy from challenging wastewater. Specifically, nanostructured membranes that exhibit tailored wettabilities are presented, ranging from hydrophilicity to omniphobicity. Three applications of the membranes are discussed: (1) water reclamation from hypersaline water, (2) methane harvesting from wastewater as an energy source, and (3) water recovery from highly fouling wastewater using Janus membranes.

Biography

Dr. Jongho Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He earned his PhD from the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014). Before he came to UBC, Dr. Lee was a postdoctoral researcher in the Dept. of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University. He received his B.S (2003) and M.S (2007) from the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Seoul National University in South Korea. Primarily using membrane-based technologies, Dr. Lee is solving a wide range of problems in the water and energy nexus, including desalination, resource harvesting from wastewater, energy conversion from wasteheat, and biomimicking water treatment processes.