Nguyen wins First Prize Poster Award at AIChE Annual Meeting

Hien Nguyen.

Hien Nguyen and his award winning poster at the 2019 UB CBE Graduate Student Research Symposium. Photo by the Onion Studio.

Published December 4, 2019

Hien Nguyen, a PhD student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, received the best poster award of the Separations Division at the 2019 AIChE Annual Meeting for his work on carbonized membrane materials.  

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Nguyen joined associate professor Haiqing Lin’s research group in 2016. His research focuses on developing and optimizing carbonized membrane materials for pre-combustion CO2 capture and H2 purification. Membranes technology is a promising avenue to carry separation efficiently and affordably. However, most polymeric membranes tend to exhibit poor H2/CO2 separation properties. 

His work addresses this shortcoming by looking at the polymer-derived approach, specifically pyrolyzing polybenzimidazole doped with phosphoric acid.  The pyrolysis of such polymeric precursor yields carbon molecular sieves (CMS) with both incredibly high H2 permeability (productivity) and H2/CO2 selectivity (efficiency), making these CMS materials commercially attractive for pre-combustion CO2 capture.

Nguyen has won several other awards for his research, including the First Prize Poster Award for Excellence in Material Research at the 2019 UB Chemical and Biological Engineering Graduate Student Research Symposium, Third Prize Poster Award at the North American Membrane Society (NAMS) 2018 Conference, and the Elias Klein Traveling Award from NAMS 2018 Conference.