Dr. Sankar Nair has been involved with IPST and the PSE program since 2006.  At that time, his work involved membranes for biofuel/water separation.  More recently, he has built on that work and expanded into other areas of interest to our students and members.

Dr. Sankar Nair’s current research uses innovative chemical processing methods to create, understand, and engineer nanoporous materials and devices. This work has applications in renewable and clean energy, carbon capture, advanced separation, and nanoscale sensors.  A common thread uniting his research topics is manipulating the unique properties resulting from the reduction of a material's dimensions to the nanometer scale or from the nanostructuring of a material.  Professor Nair also credits substantial collaborations with other research groups at Georgia Tech and other institutions and particularly notes his work with Professor Christopher Jones, also of the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.

Professor Nair points to three major areas of this current research focus:

• Scalable molecular sieving membranes
• Production of tailored nanoscale materials
• Porous hybrid materials and membranes

Molecular Sieving Materials and Membranes

Molecular sieving materials and membrane processing holds promise in the advancement of olefin-paraffin separation for the production of petrochemicals. Dr. Nair's group has made significant contributions in discovering and developing innovative strategies in this area.  Key advances in this work include: (1) Functional and finely tunable porous materials through  synthesis of mixed-linker Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework materials; (2) Gas-phase separations using low-temperature growth of high-quality ZIF membranes on polymeric hollow fibers; and (3) Liquid-phase separations via functionalized mesoporous silica membranes on polymeric hollow fibers.

Tailored Nanoscale Materials

Nanotubes and other nanoscopic objects are highly desirable materials because of their unique shape, size, porosity, and potential for new and diverse functionalities. Dr. Nair’s research at Georgia Tech has laid a foundation of mechanistic and molecular-level engineering principles for the assembly of inorganic nanoscopic objects with ultra-small dimensions. His group has focused on single-walled metal-oxide nanotubes; this work has elucidated key aspects of the kinetics and energetics of formation and growth of these materials, and the factors underlying sub-nanometer control of their dimensions. His group has shown how subtle control over interatomic forces can be used to shape nanotube objects with precisely controlled dimensions.

Further, this understanding has potential applications in organic/water and ethanol water separations.  Dr. Nair’s research has explored synthesis of tailored nanotube materials with organic-functionalized interiors (with Dr. C. W. Jones) and fabrication of high-quality nanotube/polymer membranes for organic/water separations, including potential use in ethanol-water separation in biofuel production. 

Porous Hybrid Materials and Membranes

Dr. Nair’s group has made significant advances in developing the chemistry of processing porous layered materials such as AMH-3 into functional membranes for gas separations. Since joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Nair has made significant contributions in developing the science and technology of this class of materials and of nanocomposite membrane architectures based upon them.

An important discovery was that such membrane architectures allow a large enhancement in separations performance at very small contents of porous layered materials. Another recent discovery was that of hybrid zeolitic materials consisting of epitaxially grown layered zeolites on bulk zeolite surfaces. In a related area, Drs. Nair and Jones have made substantial contributions in the engineering of hybrid materials and membranes important in a number of separations applications in the energy and petrochemical industries, combining zeolite molecular sieves with metal oxide surface nanostructures and polymeric matrices.

Dr. Sankar Nair is Professor and James F. Simmons Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.  Dr. Nair received hisB. Tech., Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi, and his M.S. in Physics and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Dr. Nair's publications may be found at nair.chbe.gatech.edu/Publications.html