Temperature-regulation liquid gating membrane with controllable gas/liquid separation

Membrane separation technology with the ability to regulate gas/liquid transport and separation is critical for environmental fields, such as sewerage treatment, multiphase separation, and desalination. Although numerous membranes can dynamically control liquid-phase fluids transport via external stimuli, the transport and separation of gas-phase fluids remains a challenge. Here, we show a temperature-regulation liquid gating membrane that allows in-situ dynamically controllable gas/liquid transfer and multiphase separation by integrating a thermo-wettability responsive porous membrane with functional gating liquid. Experiments and theoretical analysis have demonstrated the temperature-regulation mechanism of this liquid gating system, which is based on thermo-responsive changes of porous membrane surface polarity, leading to changes in affinity between the porous membrane and the gating liquid. In addition, the sandwich configuration with dense Au-coated surfaces and heterogeneous internal components by a bistable interface design enables the liquid gating system to enhance response sensitivity and maintain working stability. This temperature-regulation gas/liquid transfer strategy expands the application range of liquid gating membranes,which are promising in environmental governance, water treatment and multiphase separation.

Stimuli-responsive Membranes： Smart Tools for Controllable Mass-transfer and Separation Processes

As emerging artificial biomimetic membranes, smart or intelligent membranes that are able to respond to environmental stimuli are attracting ever-increasing interests from various fields. Their permeation properties including hydraulic permeability and diffusional permeability can be dramatically controlled or adjusted self-regulatively in response to small chemical and/or physical stimuli in their environments. Such environmental stimuli-responsive smart membranes could find myriad applications in numerous fields ranging from controlled release to separations. Here the trans-membrane mass-transfer and membrane separation is introduced as the beginning to initiate the requirement of smart membranes, and then bio-inspired design of environmental stimuli-responsive smart membranes and four essential elements for smart membranes are introduced and discussed. Next, smart membrane types and their applications as smart tools for controllable mass-transfer in controlled release and separations are reviewed. The research tooics in the near future are also suggested.

Performance prediction of magnetorheological fluid‐based liquid gating membrane by kriging machine learning method

Smart liquid gating membrane is a responsive structural material as a pressure-driven system that consists of solid membrane and dynamic liquid,responding to the external field.An accurate prediction of rheological and mechanical properties is important for the designs of liquid gating membranes for various applications.However,high predicted accuracy by the traditional sequential method requires a large amount of experimental data,which is not practical in some situations.To conquer these problems,artificial intelligence has promoted the rapid development of material science in recent years,bringing hope to solve these challenges.Here we propose a Kriging machine learning model with an active candidate region,which can be smartly updated by an expected improvement probability method to increase the local accuracy near the most sensitive search region,to predict the mechanical and rheolo-gical performance of liquid gating system with an active minimal size of ex-perimental data.Besides this,this new machine learning model can instruct our experiments with optimal size.The methods are then verified by liquid gating membrane with magnetorheological fluids,which would be of wide interest for the design of potential liquid gating applications in drug release,microfluidic logic,dynamic fluid control,and beyond.