(3bi) Sustainable Materials for Water Development

Overview: At the Materials for Water laboratory, my fundamental understandings in colloids, soft matter, surface/interface science, and transport in porous media will be integrated together to elucidate and establish sustainable approaches to tackle water challenges. More specifically, challenges in groundwater remediation, membrane processes for water treatment/purification, and contaminant discharge to water bodies will be targeted by developing functional materials from sustainable resources. Therefore, in short, at the Materials for Water laboratory, we develop materials for water remediation and treatment.

Background: I received my Ph.D. in 2017 from University of Waterloo, Canada, in Chemical Engineering. In my graduate work, under the supervision of Prof. Marios Ioannidis, I focused on improving the fundamental understanding and engineering applications of biocompatible nanoparticles produced from ethyl cellulose (EC). I demonstrated that EC nanoparticles are surface-active and, using them, I generated stable emulsions (1–3) and further used them as templates to design and fabricate porous materials (EC membranes) for oil-water separation (4). For my graduate work, I received a number of awards and scholarships including the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (one of five awardees university-wide), the RBC Water Scholarship, and the Waterloo Institute of Nanotechnology Fellowship. I was awarded an NSF-supported postdoctoral fellowship from Princeton Center for Complex Materials (PCCM) at Princeton University, and joined Prof. Rodney Priestley’s and Prof. Sujit Datta’s teams in 2018. As a postdoctoral fellow, I expanded my research by understanding the transport of colloids in porous media. I led the writeup of a book chapter (5) reviewing the principles and new findings of polymer colloids transport in porous media. Using a multiscale visualization approach, I have explored, for the first time, the effects of particle chemistry and operating conditions on colloidal particle deposition in porous media. This work, which is under review in Science Advances (6), provides guidelines for more effective colloidal transport in environmental and energy settings for groundwater remediation and oil recovery practices. In another project, I have demonstrated a framework to produce structured nanocolloids (Janus or core-shell) using biocompatible polymers to reduce the water footprint in consumer products. I have contributed in a collaborative project to demonstrate the capability of surface activity of Janus colloids in stabilizing Pickering emulsion (7).

Research Interests: Developing materials will be the driving force in my research team, yet the promise of utility of such materials will be proven in establishing new, or improving current, technologies to resolve challenges in our water supply. I will be seeking to address a number of fundamental and practical questions in my research. The team will selectively produce structured nanocolloids from sustainable resources and fundamentally understand how they interact in complex multiphase systems. The new knowledge that we will discover together with engineering skills will be the basis to rationalize the design and application of colloids and porous materials for water treatment and purification. My expertise in colloidal production using novel approaches including flash nanoprecipitation (FNP), designing and operating 2D and 3D microfluidic systems, and a wide range of characterization techniques (from microscopy to material characterization) will support the teams’ success. I outline three specific research directions of the Materials for Water laboratory:

• In membrane technology for water treatment, we will seek answers for: how do we improve durability and thermomechanical properties of membranes as well as how can we better understand the mechanism of emulsion breakup in membranes? To address these fundamental and practical questions, I will first design a scalable continuous approach to generate Pickering emulsions to template EC membranes fabrication. I will then optimize the performance of EC membranes for oil-water separation in terms of porosity and pore size distribution to effectively separate oil and water. Finally, the optimized EC membranes will be used to understand the mechanism of oil-water separation and oil-in-water emulsion breakup in membranes.

• To tackle groundwater remediation challenges and push the current techniques into a new direction, I will use EC nanoparticles as a promising foaming agent to generate foam in situ while invading a subsurface contaminated region. Due to the large apparent viscosity of foams, channelization and fingering instabilities during multiphase transport in porous media will be avoided, and thus, the entire porous medium will be invaded effectively by foam. I will generate foam in situ, for the first time, by injecting aqueous suspensions of EC nanoparticles that are supersaturated in CO₂ to a 2D micromodel. I will elucidate pore-scale and macroscale transport dynamics by direct imaging. I will then optimize foam stability for the best invading pattern. Eventually, I will expand the 2D studies to a 3D micromodel and to a pilot scale column.

• To fabricate porous materials with tunable functionality, I propose novel engineering application of surface-active Janus nanoparticles to generate Pickering emulsions. Using these emulsions as a template, we can fabricate functionalized membranes, filters, or nanocomposites for sustainable development for water treatment and purification. Specifically, I will study the adsorption kinetics of Janus nanoparticles to the fluid interfaces by a series of dynamic surface/interfacial tension measurements. This will provide the required knowledge to establish the best procedure to generate stable emulsions with Janus nanoparticles. Ultimately, by modifying each side of Janus colloids, membranes and porous materials with desired functionality such as anti-fouling and water repellent/absorbent will be fabricated.

Teaching Interests: I have been teaching for more than 6 years as an instructor, a teaching assistant, lab mentor, and private tutor at the post-secondary education level (at the University of Waterloo and Princeton University). I have accomplished advanced teaching skills by participating in Fundamentals of University Teaching (FUT) program offered at the University of Waterloo (UW). As a teaching assistant for the fourth-year laboratory, I led the project-based experiments including pilot-scale bubble cap distillation column, packed bed absorption/stripping columns, and batch/continuous reactor setup. I have been teaching as a sessional instructor for two academic terms in Fall 2016 and Fall 2017 at UW. In Fall 2016, I taught “Chemistry for Engineers” to first-year management engineering students—a mandatory course for all first-year engineering students—and in Fall 2017, I taught “Chemistry for Engineers” for the second time and also “Equilibrium Stage Operations” to second-year chemical engineering students.

Given my research expertise in colloid and interface science, transport in porous media, and material development, I will be confident teaching the following core courses in Chemical Engineering: Chemical Engineering Principles, Thermodynamics and Physical Chemistry, Transport Phenomena and Fluid Mechanics, and Separation Processes. Moreover, I look forward to offering advanced special topics in Transport in Porous Media, Colloids and Interfacial Phenomena, Water Resources Management, and Process Design.

Selected Publications:

1. N. Bizmark, M. A. Ioannidis, D. E. Henneke, Irreversible adsorption-driven assembly of nanoparticles at fluid interfaces revealed by a dynamic surface tension probe. Langmuir. 30, 710–717 (2014).
2. N. Bizmark, M. A. Ioannidis, Effects of ionic strength on the colloidal stability and interfacial assembly of hydrophobic ethyl cellulose nanoparticles. Langmuir. 31, 9282–9289 (2015).
3. N. Bizmark, M. A. Ioannidis, Ethyl cellulose nanoparticles at the alkane-water interface and the making of Pickering emulsions. Langmuir. 33, 10568–10576 (2017).
4. N. Bizmark, M. A. Ioannidis, High internal phase Pickering emulsions as templates for a cellulosic functional porous material. ACS Sustain. Chem. Eng. 8, 3664–3672 (2020).
5. N. Bizmark, J. Schneider, E. de Jong, S. S. Datta, in Polymer Colloids: Formation, Characterization and Applications (The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2020; http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/9781788016476-00289), pp. 289–321.
6. N. Bizmark, J. Schneider, R. D. Priestley, S. S. Datta, Multiscale dynamics of colloidal deposition in porous media (In Review). Sci. Adv.
7. T. I. Morozova*, V. E. Lee*, N. Bizmark, S. S. Datta, R. K. Prud’homme, A. Nikoubashman, R. D. Priestley, In Silico Design Enables the Rapid Production of Surface-Active Colloidal Amphiphiles. ACS Cent. Sci. 6, 166–173 (2020).