Chemical separation processes account for 15% of global energy usage, distillation being the dominant technique. Isoporous membranes have been extensively studied over the past decade as they promise to replace energy intensive distillation. Self-assembling isoporous membranes are particularly interesting as these membranes can be rapidly produced without the use of complex machinery. Until this point however, self-assembling membranes have only been realized at the lab scale due to annealing procedures which are not amenable to scalable manufacturing techniques ie. continuous manufacturing. Block copolymers with sufficiently high repulsion (xN > 10.5) will spontaneously phase separate into nano domains when given enough mobility, traditionally through solvent vapor or thermal annealing. Both techniques produce highly ordered nano patterns used to template membranes but take hours or even days to complete. By incorporating a high boiling point solvent into the coating solution we have shown it possible to eliminate the lengthy annealing step altogether while providing sufficient mobility for self-assembly to occur. Our annealing process is easily incorporated into a continuous production process such as our custom roll to roll (R2R) printer allowing the manufacture of dramatically less expensive nanoporous membranes.
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