Metal AM in separation and purification technology

Hello All! I’m associate professor Eveliina Repo   from the department of Separation Science in  LUT University and i’m going to tell you how   additive manufacturing can be used in the  separation and purification technologies. 

Separation technology is quite new field for  additive manufacturing. There are not many   studies conducted yet. During five recent  years the amount of publications has increased,   so amount of research has increased, and also  some practical applications have appeared   within recent years and some companies have  started to consider this technology to produce   and to improve the separation processes.  There are different possibilities to   utilize additive manufacturing or 3D  printing in the separation technology and   in some cases this can be very beneficial as  you can see later during my two other lectures. 

Different separation technologies utilizes  different structures, different kind of equipment,   conditions can vary a lot, and also materials that  are used are very different in these different   processes. This 3D printing can be utilized  differently of course in these processes but the   benefits are still rather same compared to other  applications. Challenging geometries is one of the   interesting and important benefit when we are  using additive manufacturing. Energy efficiency   can be increased, the environmental impacts can  be reduced, so more environmentally friendly   processes can be designed, and also special  parts, spare parts can be produced by 3d printing. 

Here you can see one of the examples of  challenging geometries: so this is an optimized   heat exchanger. So as you can see, there are a lot  of these tubes and channels in this heat exchanger   and as you can imagine, this part  cannot be produced with all the   conventional technologies. This material here  is an EOS aluminum material that has been used   and the equipment is also EOSINT M 270. The  time to build this part is almost 85 hours. 

Some material examples for separation  technology are different alloys,   melted and re-solidificated materials, plastics,  metals. We can use different types of metals,   ceramics, graphene, carbons. Even  biopolymers have been also printed,   like cellulose is quite topical issue at the  moment. Different printing methods can be used   and also this kind of materials that  can tolerate kind of extreme conditions. 

Very shortly here - some applications. For in the  next lectures i will tell a little bit detailed   about some of these methods. So one application  is scavengers/ion exchangers/adsorbents. You can   check here the benefits and these drawbacks of  these methods, but especially future lies on   the water and gas purification and metal  recovery. The biocarriers it means that we can   grow bacteria or algae on the surface of  the parts that are additively manufactured   and the future lies on the  optimization of these structures.  Distillation is one of the methods. We could,  in the future, get cheaper distillation units   by using additive manufacturing.

Chromatography  is a little bit similar to this ion exchange,   so chromatography is for separation  processes and especially less pressure   is needed when we have optimal chromatographic  columns for the separation. And this is possible   when we are using this additive manufacturing  in the preparation of chromatographic columns. 

Then, spacers. Spacers and these here these  turbulence promoters - they are related to   the membrane technology. We will talk about  this later, but we can produce all of these   parts for the membranes & spacers means  that we can increase energy efficiency,   you will see later. For membranes, we can  create different kind of surface patterns   and we don’t need to use so much chemicals.  Turbulence promoters prevent the falling   of the membranes, so it keeps  the liquid in turbulence motion,   which means that the filtering stays more  efficient when the membrane stays kind of fresh   during the process.

And also about electrodes  i will tell you a little bit more later,   but in electrodes definitely the different kind  of textures to increase the surface area increases   the electrochemical amount of electrochemical  reactions on the surface. It’s highly important   and with the metal additive manufacturing we  can really produce electrodes that are much more   efficient than the normal flat shaped electrodes  that are used in many cases at the moment. 

About energy efficiency, here’s  one example: this is a filtering   system and when we have this kind of shape,  the pressure drops drop inside this filter,   or when the liquid is put through to this filter,  it’s decreased significantly though, so this kind   of structure cannot be produced in other ways  than additive manufacturing. So pressure drop   which is decreasing means also less energy needed  for pumping of the liquid through the filter.  

So this was the first part of the lectures  and i will continue in the second lectures   related to these applications and  tell you a little bit more about this.