Dr. Mark Bissett

Dr. Mark A. Bissett received his Ph.D. in Nanotechnology from Flinders University (Australia) in 2011 before he joined the Institute for Materials Chemistry and Engineering at Kyushu University (Japan). Since 2014 he has worked at the University of Manchester (UK) and is currently a Reader (Professor) in Nanomaterials in the Department of Materials. He is also the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of his spin-out company, Molymem Limited. He has a large academic research group with significant government and industrial grant funding focusing on the formulation and technological integration of nanomaterial containing membranes, electrochemical energy storage technologies, as well as polymer nanocomposites. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers, as well as several patents, and is the co-inventor of the Molymem technology.

2D Nanomaterials for use in water filtration applications

A new class of materials, known as 2D nanomaterials, are becoming more and more popular within academia for applications in separation technology and recently we have seen them begin to transition from the lab into industry. The most widely known of these materials is graphene and the related graphene oxide. Our company, Molymem Limited, is a University of Manchester spin-out which is commercialising our patented technology based on the 2D nanomaterial molybdenum disulphide (MoS2). This material is used to form a coating consisting of a laminar structure of these 2D layers on top of porous supporting layers, and allows for an improvement in performance for efficient ionic rejection and nanofiltration applications in the water treatment industry. We can control the rejection and flux through chemical functionalisation of this coating, allowing for a high degree of tunability. In this talk, I will give a technical background of our technology, and put it in context of the progress in the wider academic field on the use of 2D materials for filtration, as well as discuss future directions we may see these 2D materials get adopted in the near future.