Srikanth Nayak

Chemical separation processes are fundamental to the chemical industry and consume a large portion of the industrial energy usage. Advances in chemical separations are critical to addressing pressing global and national challenges such as green house gas emissions (separating potent GHG gases from dilute streams), desalination and decontamination, critical mineral extraction and recycling, and nuclear waste processing are some of the prominent examples. Traditional separation processes rely on thermal unit operations such as distillation and evaporation, and are energetically expensive leading to undesirably large ecological and climactic footprint. This has motivated the development of efficient and selective non-thermal separation processes such as ion-exchange and membrane separations. My research is focused on understanding the fundamental drivers of chemical separations and design novel separations media and processes that are scalable, less energy intensive, and environmentally benign. The main focus is on the separation of metallic components from liquid streams. It rests on three pillars: 1) metal complexation in complex electrolytes and confined media, 2) interfacial phenomena in metal separations, and 3) synthesis of selective- and tunable nanomaterials.