Membranes are finding wide applications in various fields spanning biological, water, and energy areas. Synthesis of membranes to provide tunable flux, metal sorption, and catalysis has been done through pore functionalization of microfiltration (MF) type membranes with responsive behavior. This methodology provides an opportunity to improve synthetic membrane performance via polymer fabrication and surface modification. By optimizing the polymer coagulation conditions in phase inversion fabrication, spongy polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membranes with high porosity and large internal pore volume were created in lab and full scale. This robust membrane shows a promising mechanical strength as well as high capacity for loading of adsorptive and catalytic materials. By applying surface modification techniques, synthetic membranes with different functionality (carboxyl, amine, and nanoparticle-based) were obtained. These functionalities provide an opportunity to fine-tune the membrane surface properties such as charge and reactivity. The incorporation of stimuli-responsive acrylic polymers (polyacrylic acid or sodium polyacrylate) in membrane pores also results in tunable pore size and ion-exchange capacity. This provides the added benefits of adjustable membrane permeability and metal capture efficiency. The equilibrium and dynamic binding capacity of these functionalized spongy membranes were studied via calcium ion-exchange. Iron/palladium catalytic nanoparticles were immobilized in the polymer matrix in order to perform the challenging degradation of the environmental pollutant trichloroethylene (TCE).

The loss of some amount of water through leaks is inevitable in a water distribution network (WDN). Usually, leakage losses are included as volume-based demands by increasing the nodal demands by a certain percentage in the design of WDNs. However, leaks are pressure dependent and increase with an increase in pressure in the pipeline. In this study, a methodology is proposed to include leakage as pressure-driven demands along with normal volume-based demands and both volume and pressure-based demands. Two cases for distribution of leakage in the network are considered during the design: (1) leakages that are distributed based on nodal demands, (2) those that are distributed based on the length of pipe. An iterative optimization methodology is proposed that considers the link diameters as continuous variables. It begins by assuming the nodal heads at all of the demand nodes are above the desired pressure heads. These assumed heads are successively corrected until the difference in cost in the two s...

Future water demands and pipe roughness coefficients used in the design of water distribution networks (WDNs) have a high degree of uncertainty. Fuzzy analysis of WDNs provide how the uncertainties in independent or basic parameters (such as nodal demands and pipe roughness coefficients) are propagated to dependent or derived parameters (such as pipe flows, pipe velocities, and available pressure heads). Usually demand dependent analysis is used for such analysis. A WDN may be pressure deficient or may become pressure deficient because of high pipe roughness or inadequate pump pressure and may not be able to meet desired demands at all nodes. Thus, it is desirable to consider the nodal outflows as unknown and as a function of available pressure heads under pressure-deficient conditions. An approach for fuzzy analysis of a WDN that takes into account pressure-deficient condition using node flow analysis is presented in this paper. The proposed methodology is illustrated with an example network taken from literature. The methodology is useful in identifying vulnerable zones in WDNs and can be extended for reliability analysis under uncertainty of nodal demands and pipe roughness coefficients. Comparison of results with usual demand-dependent analysis shows that proposed method is better for identifying vulnerable zones.