DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

UNIVERSITI PUTRA MALAYSIA

43400 UPM SERDANG, SELANGOR, MALAYSIA

RECRUITING A POSTGRADUATE STUDENT (MASTER/PHD)

A Master/PhD position is available starting in Spring/Fall 2021 at the Department of

Chemical and Environmental Engineering, UPM to work on a project related to Vapor
Phase Synthesis of Hybrid Metal Organic Framework Membranes for Gas Separations
funded by the GP-IPM fund.

The goal of the project is to develop ultrathin metal organic framework (MOF) or zeolitic
imidazolate framework (ZIF) membranes for gas separations, in particular hydrogen from
carbon dioxide and to tune their molecular sieving properties to target other gas mixtures.
Commercial deployment of gas separation membranes for emerging/unsolved membrane
applications (e.g., hydrogen purification, carbon dioxide removal and olefin/paraffin
separation) are hindered mainly due to (i) limited separation capabilities of current
membrane materials and (ii) lack of cost-effective processing to prepare advanced
membrane materials. Despite showing excellent separation performances, polycrystalline
MOF/ZIF membranes are prohibitively expensive with full module cost two- to three-order
of magnitude higher than that of polymeric membranes. Most experts believe that a true
solution behind this problem is productivity increase (making thin membranes and
synthesizing membranes on high-surface-to-volume module) to a point where the capital
investment of setting up MOF/ZIF membranes is economically as attractive as other
competing technologies. The project involves experimental work on the synthesis of
hybrid sub-100 nm thick MOF/ZIF membranes and characterization of the membranes at
molecular and mesoscopic level.

The student will be supervised by Dr. Mohamad Rezi Abdul Hamid. The student should
be admitted to the UPM Chemical Engineering Graduate program and is expected to
spend bulk of his/her time in the Faculty of Engineering in the main campus of UPM.
Interested candidates are invited to send their CV describing their academic qualification,
work/research experience along with other supporting document to Dr. Rezi at
m_rezi@upm.edu.my.

The official announcement can be found here.

Principal Investigator : Dr. Mohamad Rezi Abdul Hamid

Tel. : +603-97696382
Email : m_rezi@upm.edu.my
Website : https://mohamadreziabdulha.wixsite.com/mysite