Rethinking how membranes are made.
Bringing new products and processes to the industrial landscape.
Our Challenge
Conventional membrane technologies have enabled decades of progress in water purification and resource recovery and have evolved into highly mature technologies, delivering excellent and consistent performance at scale. However, further improvements within conventional membrane architectures are increasingly incremental, while their fundamental structure creates trade offs between permeability, rejection, and selectivity. As water separation challenges become increasingly demanding, unlocking the next level of performance requires a disruptive approach to membrane design that moves beyond the performance envelope of conventional technologies.
Our Approach
Our biomimetic platform is designed to overcome the fundamental performance trade offs of conventional membrane architectures, creating opportunities for disruptive improvements in membrane performance. At the core of our platform is a thin nanostructured layer densely integrated with membrane transport proteins, enabling tunable transport performance and selectivity.
By decoupling membrane transport characteristics from the constraints of conventional architectures, our platform creates new possibilities for developing separation products with application specific performance.
Our goal is simple: develop membrane technologies that adapt to industry needs, rather than forcing industry to adapt to membrane technology limitations.
Our Adaptability
We have all the building blocks for almost any separation challenge. We can choose a specific membrane protein that defines the selectivity for a given application. Likely, this protein can be found in nature. If not, we have the potential to design it. Once we have that, we then need to embed this protein into our nanostructures and cover it with a support membrane.
The ability to arrive at this highly “selective blanket” is due to the versatility of our technology, along with three important steps in the process: substrate production, nanoparticle production, and membrane coating.
The world’s most efficient purification mechanism has evolved over eons.
Nanoparticle Production
Manufacturing proteins is a well understood process. It’s used in everything from brewing beer and wine-making to delivering high-quality nutrition and healthcare. We’ve developed the capacity to produce and purify proteins in large bioreactors with high yield. Our challenge lies in encapsulating the proteins in nanoparticles that can deliver a robust component which provides functionality when incorporated into an industrial product.
Membrane proteins perform wonderfully in their native environments, but industrial applications push them to their limits. They operate at high temperatures, pressures, and extreme pH conditions. We need to ensure the proteins can be used in a product that delivers a meaningful performance advantage over conventional technology and allows them to perform in industrial conditions.
Addressing this gap was one of the biggest challenges we faced. We’ve solved it through patent protected designs and processes for protein formulation.
Substrate Production
Conventional polymeric membranes used as substrates for polyamide coating processes do not deliver the characteristics needed for coating with a protein layer. The substrate material needs to be compatible with the protein layer. The pore size needs to be of similar size as the protein nanostructure. Plus, the membrane thickness should be as thin as possible but as robust as needed for the application.
Critical to a successful end product is a high-performance substrate that is designed and manufactured to tolerances that are beyond conventional technology and can be delivered at a competitive cost. We have formulated membranes and developed manufacturing processes that provide a consistent membrane surface on which we can coat our protein nanostructures.
Membrane Coating
Marrying the protein nanoparticles with the substrate provides our final coated membrane. Conventional coating processes and chemistries don’t permit proteins to perform optimally. We’re developing in-house coating processes to enable the protein channels to deliver the results they’re naturally capable of – high efficiency, high selectivity, and low energy transport of targeted molecules.
Vandstrom’s
Difference
Thin-film Composite Polyamide (TFC-PA) Membranes
TFC PA layer by interfacial polymerization. Uneven pore size and distribution. Selectivity and performance trade-offs.
Other Biomimetric Membranes
Vesicles with transport protein (mostly Aquaporins) in PA layers. Aquaporin protein denatures in non-native environment. PA chemistry overpowers in performance than biomimetic vesicles.
Vandstrom’s Biomimetric Membrane
No TFC PA chemistry. Selective layer made with mimetic structures embedded on a substrate. Uses engineered transport protein for tuning selectivity and preventing denaturing in non-native environments.