Jeffrey McCutcheon is the General Electric Professor of Advanced Manufacturing in the Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Yale University. For nearly 20 years, he has pioneered work in membrane based separations, notably in the areas of osmotic processes and membrane formation. He has published over 120 refereed publications and has several patents on membrane technology. He has served the separations community as a Director for both the AIChE Separations Division and the North American Membrane Society (NAMS) and served as President of NAMS. He recently concluded a 5-year term as the Deputy Topic Area lead for Materials & Manufacturing Topic Area in the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), the Department of Energy’s $100M “Water Hub” dedicated to supporting the development of desalination technology in the United States. He has received numerous awards including the FRI/John G. Kunesh Award from the AIChE Separations Division, the AIChE Separation Division FRI/Neil Yeoman Innovation Award, the North American Membrane Society Permeance Prize and the Global Water Summit Water Technology Idol. In 2024 he won the Paul L. Busch Award from the Water Research Foundation, and he was inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 2021. In 2017, he was named the Executive Director of Fraunhofer USA Center for Energy Innovation and served for 3 years before taking the Center to its now independent status as the Connecticut Center for Applied Separations Technologies (CCAST). CCAST is dedicated to identifying opportunities to implement membrane and other advanced separation technology into various industrial processes in order to lower energy use, reduce carbon footprint, limit waste, and prevent adverse environmental and health impacts. He is also the Founder and CEO of membraneX, a UConn spinout dedicated to commercializing a new membrane manufacturing technology.

Customized Membranes for Water Treatment and Desalination

The thin film composite (TFC) membrane is a versatile membrane design platform that enables the use of ultra-thin membranes with both high selectivity and productivity. The ultra-thin nature of these fragile membranes necessitates the use of a porous, non-selective and low resistance support layer that provides mechanical strength. The TFC membrane is defined by these two layers being chemically distinct and therefore customizable based on desired characteristics (e.g. cost, processability, selectivity). The most commonly manufactured TFC membrane is the reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration (NF) membrane. These membranes are made through interfacial polymerization, which is a process developed over 40 years ago by John Cadotte. This process was a major innovation in membrane manufacturing as it allowed for the formation of the thin selective layer to be formed in-situ directly onto the supporting membrane. The process is scalable and enables the mass production of high performance RO membranes. The process and these membranes are not without their drawbacks, however. The process is relatively uncontrollable, is limited to a small subset of polymer material chemistries, and can lead to membranes with some undesirable properties (e.g. roughness). Despite these limitations, this manufacturing process has not changed in over 40 years and instead the community has engineered around these weaknesses through increasingly complex and expensive process system design. In this talk, we provide context for why this has happened and offer a new manufacturing innovation, electrohydrodynamic spray, that may enable the expansion of TFC membrane chemistries to well beyond those currently offered commercially. This expanded library of chemistries will enable emergent “clever” reverse osmosis processes to perform with low specific energy consumption. We demonstrate our ability to make membranes with a range of predictable performance and articulate a value proposition for commercial use cases.