The Development of Photo-Responsive Adsorbents for Circular Chemical Engineering by Professor Cher Hon (Sam) Lau

NTU MSE Seminar Hosted by Professor Lee Pooi See

Abstract

Global challenges in climate change, resource scarcity and water pollution demand smarter materials that can capture, convert and recover valuable resources from waste streams sustainably. Our group develops photo-responsive porous materials, including metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs), whose structures can be switched, activated or tuned by light to perform targeted chemical separations and transformations. In this seminar, I will share with you the full development pipeline of our research in this area. We use computational simulations to understand how molecules interact with porous material surfaces at the atomic scale, guiding the rational design of next-generation adsorbents before they are synthesised. These computational insights inform the development of materials tested across four application domains: (1) carbon capture from industrial flue gases; (2) recovery of critical metals and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from industrial wastewater; (3) solvent recovery to support circular manufacturing; and (4) photocatalytic conversion of water and air into hydrogen peroxide — a green oxidant with broad industrial utility — and photocatalytic water treatment to remove pharmaceutical contaminants. For each application, we quantify real-world impact through life cycle assessment (LCA), ensuring that the environmental benefits of our materials are rigorously evidenced rather than assumed. Together, these activities advance a vision of circular chemical engineering: industrial processes that recover rather than discard, and that harness sunlight to drive chemistry that currently depends on fossil energy.

Biography


Professor Cher Hon (Sam) Lau
EPSRC Fellow and Personal Chair in Circular Chemical Engineering, 
Institute for Materials and Processes
School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh

Sam Lau is an EPSRC Fellow, Personal Chair in Circular Chemical Engineering and Head of the Institute of Materials and Processes (IMP) at the School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on porous polymer membranes, sustainable separations, and circular chemical manufacturing — spanning the design and synthesis of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and covalent organic polymers (COPs) through to process-scale application and life cycle assessment. Sam has been active in separation science since 2008, with a research background spanning microporous materials, membrane fabrication, and photo-responsive adsorbents. He is a graduate of Ngee Ann Polytechnic (Singapore), Flinders University (Australia), and the National University of Singapore, with training across electronics and computer engineering, nanotechnology, and chemical and biomolecular engineering. This unusually broad technical foundation underpins his interdisciplinary approach to materials-led chemical engineering. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers on microporous materials as membranes, adsorbents and nanocomposites for applications including carbon capture, desalination, organic solvent nanofiltration, and pervaporation. His research has been cited more than 7,000 times, with an h-index of 47. Since joining Edinburgh, Sam has led programmes on 3D printing and flow synthesis for scalable materials production, photocatalytic conversion of water and air into hydrogen peroxide, metal and solvent recovery from industrial wastewater, and direct air capture of CO₂.