Interfacial adsorption and transport are the chemical and physical processes that underlie separations. Although separations technology accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in the global economy, the process is not well-understood at the mechanistic level and instead is almost always optimized empirically. One of the reasons is that access to the underlying molecular phenomena has only been available recently via single-molecule methods. There are still interesting challenges because adsorption, desorption, and transport are all dynamic processes, whereas much of the advances in super-resolution imaging have focused on imaging static materials. Our lab has focused in recent years on developing and optimizing data analysis methods for quantifying the dynamics of adsorption and transport in porous materials at nanometer-resolution spatial scales. Our methods include maximizing information content in dynamic single-molecule data and developing methods to detect change-points in binned data. My talk will outline these methods, and will address how and when they can be applied to extract dynamic details in heterogeneous materials such as porous membranes.
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