Fundamentals of Separation Science and Engineering

Chemical separations are of immense and increasing importance in the modern world for everything from clean water and alternative energy to new drugs. Demands for more efficient use of natural resources, valorization of resources from more dilute and more complex mixtures, higher purity products, and lower detection limits, as well as the critical need to perform all these separations with less energy, provide greater incentives than ever for innovation in chemical separations. Step-change advances in chemical separations ranging from the analytical scale to commodity chemical manufacturing require an improved fundamental understanding of numerous aspects of separation science and engineering. These may include manipulating electrostatic or other enthalpic interactions, using targeted entropy changes, controlling interfaces, using external forces or fields, coupling reactions and separations, designing, synthesizing and testing new materials, and probing how separation materials change with time, among many others. Step-change advances also require the ability to translate fundamental understanding and discoveries into viable separation technologies. This conference will bring together chemists, materials scientists and chemical engineers working in separation science, engineering and technology development. The ability for attendees to learn cutting edge information from a diverse range of applications domains will be attractive to both seasoned researchers and early career professionals from academia, national laboratories/institutes, and industry.