My name is Erin Partlan and I am just starting my fourth year in the Ladner lab. This summer, I am taking part in an NSF fellowship program called EAPSI, the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute. If you haven’t heard about this program, it is a fellowship where you, as the student and PI of this summer project, identify a host counterpart in one of seven countries in the East Asia and Pacific and develop a research proposal to be carried out in conjunction with this counterpart at their university.
Since the project that I am working on at Clemson is on superfine powdered activated carbon (S-PAC) for removal of trace contaminants in drinking water treatment, it was a no-brainer to ask Dr. Yoshihiko Matsui, a leader in studying S-PAC, if he would host me. And he said yes! My proposed research for this summer is to work on the carbon-membrane interactions aspect of utilizing S-PAC. Normally, activated carbon can be removed by settling, but S-PAC is so small that settling would take too long. The solution is to use a microfiltration membrane, but even at a membrane pore size smaller than the average S-PAC particle size, pore blockage by S-PAC causes the filter flux to decline greatly. I will be investigating methods of aggregating the particles to form effectively larger particles that do not cause such high flux decline.
Here’s my poster for the proposed research. Take a look!
I guess this means you made it to Japan safely and are off to a good start in the program. I hope it is fabulous!