Water Transport Through Synthetic Membranes as Inspired by Transport Through Biological Membranes

Water is regarded as the “solvent of life” because all vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes, and plants are also primarily water. Each living cell of those organisms requires a constant supply of both water and various substances from the external environment. Water is the medium in which living cells and tissue work. It can be said that the plumbing systems for cells are aquaporins (AQPs) that are transmembrane proteins forming channels in the cell membranes. The biological roles of these proteins have been thoroughly investigated in the past several years. Scientists have gained substantial knowledge on the structure, cellular localization, biological function, and potential pathophysiological significance of mammalian aquaporins. The extremely efficient AQPs with the knowledge of water structure remain an important exploratory challenge and are inspiration to study the new artificial membrane materials. The development of bioinspired synthetic systems is based on a good understanding of the complexity of natural systems. Researchers, following the example of biological membranes, study the new artificial membrane materials and their application in water removal processes or preferential water transport. Biological membranes, which are membranes of eukaryotic cells, thanks to their structure, allow some components to penetrate and retain others. Such membrane’s property is used in the separation of liquid mixtures in membrane technology especially in pervaporation. In this process one substance preferentially permeates through the membrane and the other remains before membrane due to the pressure difference on both sides of the membrane. Our main thrust of research efforts has been concentrated on the polymeric membranes: investigation of new polymeric materials, modeling of component transport through dense polymers and description of their application. In this chapter the general overview of the comparison biological and synthetic membranes, preparation and application of different kinds of polymer membranes in the separation of water/alcohol mixture is presented. The separation of water/alcohol mixture is of extreme importance in a variety of industries ranging from medical, biology and pharmaceutical to food, chemical and alternative fuel source. The progress in transport modelling and structure analysis is also discussed.