Introduction：
Dr Qilei Song received Bachelor's degree in School of Energy and Environment at Southeast University (Nanjing) in 2006. Afterwards, he stayed working with Prof. Rui Xiao on clean energy and combustion technology, and obtained Master’s degree in 2009. In October 2009, he joined Prof. John Dennis’s group in the Department of Chemical Engineering at University of Cambridge as a PhD student working on mixed metal oxides and energy applications. In October 2010, he transferred to the Cavendish Laboratory to restart PhD on microporous polymers and molecular sieve membranes, working with Dr. Easan Sivaniah and Prof. Eugene Terentjev in the Cavendish Laboratory, and Prof. Anthony K. Cheetham in the Department of Materials Science. He passed his PhD viva in February 2014, and continued as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cavendish Laboratory. Dr Song has been awarded an Imperial College Junior Research Fellowship (2014). Dr. Song’s work is focused on functional nanomaterials and their energy and environmental applications, particularly design and fabrication of microporous polymers and membranes for molecular-level separations. He also has broad interests in understanding the structure and properties of novel functional materials for applications in clean combustion, catalysis, and energy conversion and storage.
Abstract：
Sustainable energy supply and environmental protection are major global challenges in the 21st century. Membrane separation technology offers energy-efficient and environmental-friendly solutions to these global challenges, in natural gas purification for the booming gas industry, carbon dioxide separation from flue gas for carbon capture, hydrogen fuel, air separation, production of biofuels, and desalination of seawater to clean water. Highly permeable and highly selective membranes are desired for these molecular-level separation processes.
Dr Song will introduce recent work on design and fabrication of polymer molecular sieve membranes from novel molecularly-defined microporous polymers, such as Polymers of Intrinsic Microporosity (PIMs) and Metal-organic Frameworks (MOFs). While chemists elegantly design novel synthetic chemistry for polymers and membrane materials, the amorphous and flexible nature of polymers results in a broad size distribution of free volume elements with different topologies that are also thermodynamically unstable from the viewpoint of soft matter physics. Therefore, tailoring the distribution, size, and architecture of channels and free volume elements is critical to substantial enhancement of molecular sieving function. Versatile processing methods and post-synthetic transformation approaches were developed, such as incorporation of nanocrystals into polymer matrix forming nanocomposites, transformation of molecular packing by photo-oxidation and thermal oxidative crosslinking. Molecular sieve membranes derived from PIMs polymer show ground-breaking separation performance in terms of gas permeability and selectivity, for separation of CO2 from CH4, air separation (O2/N2), and separation of H2 from large gas molecules, and great potential for many other molecular-level separations.
The broader scientific significance is putting forward the concept of transformation of novel microporous polymers to tune their pore structures and molecular sieving properties. Therefore the transformation approach could be generally extended to tailor the distribution, size, and architecture of pore and channels in a wide range of microporous organic frameworks at the sub-nanometer level.
Contacts：Group 504 Weiping Wang（9301）、Yanshuo Li（9137）