Fall Brown Bag Luncheon Series Begins on Sept. 16th
The fall semester Brown Bag Seminar Series features graduate students providing presentations on their current research and recent internships. The series begins on Wednesday, September 16th, featuring grad student Chris Buelke presenting “Water Purification Technology Development at NASA Langley Research Center”.
This series of presentations will be held in the Space Studies Library at noon. Lunch will be served. All funded grad students are expected to attend.
About the topic: Water has always been and will continue to be a valuable commodity in space. Transporting it from Earth’s surface is costly but necessary for crewed missions. If less can be transported, then more mission critical hardware or other supplies can be. This mass savings is where closed-loop filtration systems come in, which are already in place on the ISS. However, they can be made better: lower quality liquids and brines can be purified as well as increasing the amount of water purified for a given membrane’s life. This technology not only helps us up in the stars, but also here on Earth; with high desalination and anti-microbial properties, water purified with graphene membranes can truly benefit everyone.
In this Brown Bag presentation, I will be reviewing the research I conducted while at NASA Langley Research Center. The research, because it was just started, focused primarily on filtering ions (Na, K, Mg2 , Cl–) along with water flux of different membranes of different thicknesses.
About the presenter: Chris Buelke has a B.S. in applied science with a focus on nanoscience from University of Wisconsin – Stout and is currently a Graduate student in the Space Studies Department at the University of North Dakota (UND). He has worked and continues to work as a researcher on a lunar oxygen production facility under Dr. James Casler and assists with the Near Space Balloon Competition hosted by the department. Chris has a multidisciplinary background ranging from carpentry and painting to thin film development and characterization with his most recent activities focusing on materials. Most recently he was an intern at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia where he worked on developing graphene membrane to purifying water.
For information on the Brown Bag Seminar Series, please contact Space Studies faculty member Dr. Vadim Rygalov.