October 28
@
4:00 PM
–
5:00 PM
Seth Darling
Argonne National Laboratory
Lemont, IL
Layered Phyllosilicate Membranes for Energy-Critical Ion Separations in Resource Recovery
Energy systems depend not only on resilient generation and efficient storage but also on the management of critical materials. One of the most pressing challenges is the selective extraction and purification of ions from complex aqueous environments—such as recovering lithium from brines or separating rare earth elements from waste streams—using processes that are both energy-efficient and scalable. In this talk, I will present recent advances in designing and deploying two-dimensional laminar membranes based on earth-abundant phyllosilicate minerals for these applications.
Our work harnesses exfoliated vermiculite and montmorillonite flakes, which are reassembled into flexible, robust membranes with tunable interlayer galleries. Through the use of molecular cross-linkers (e.g., alkanediamines) and inorganic pillaring agents (e.g., Keggin clusters), we achieve control over interlayer spacing and surface charge, enabling precise tuning of ion transport properties. This design flexibility opens pathways to address critical separations. The resulting membranes exhibit outstanding aqueous stability, low-cost scalability, and performance characteristics rivaling or surpassing synthetic alternatives.
Beyond material synthesis and processing, I will share insights from our newly developed high-throughput ion permeation platform, which enables rapid, parallelized measurements across a wide parameter space of membrane chemistry, structure, and testing conditions. This dataset supports the development of machine learning models aimed at predicting ion transport performance from structural descriptors and experimental metadata—laying the groundwork for a material genome approach to membrane design. By connecting scalable materials chemistry with targeted energy applications, this research exemplifies a holistic approach to energy materials innovation—from atoms to applications.