In this webinar, you will learn about an emerging material, covalent organic framework (COF), which can be prepared by vacuum deposition polymerization and can be used as a nanoporous metarial for gas separation membranes including CO₂.

We will start from various CO₂ separation technology – absorption and release in liquid amine etc, separation membrane composed of porous materials, and electrochemical pumping. We will then introduce COFs and their preparation techniques, and present our improvement of vacuum deposition polymerization technique that enabled us to produce 50nm-thick neat films with cm² areas.  The method to evaluate the CO₂ separation performance will be explained. Finally, CO₂ and other gas separation mechanisms by various materials will be analysed with the aid of molecular dynamics simulations.

Tom (Toshihiro) Shimada is professor at the Division of Applied Chemistry, Hokkaido University, Japan. He obtained his degree in chemistry at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and finished his PhD. He took a position of assistant professor there after the graduation, and was an associate professor before moving to Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. He became a full professor of Hokkaido University since 2010. His activities have been related with thin films and nanomaterials, especially of 2D materials and organic semiconductor. He enjoys collaboration with industry and designed new analytical instruments and processes for materials synthesis. He also enjoys various computer-based techniques including molecular dynamics, electronic structure calculation and informatics. Tom has published approximately 250 journal papers and many patents. He is a member of various academic societies in Japan and helped organize many international conferences.