Why Researchers Should Step Out of the Lab

When Shreya Dave was an MIT doctoral student working on a new kind of filter for desalination plants, she paid a visit to a working reverse-osmosis desalination plant in Spain. She quickly learned an important lesson that she now says she would likely have missed if she’d stayed in the lab.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office 
October 4, 2017

Source: Pixabay

While much of her research, and that of many other labs, had focused on how to make filter materials that could have a high flow rate at the pressures they would encounter when put into use, her visit to the plant revealed that this permeability was hardly ever a source of operational problems.

Instead, problems such as the handling of the filters during removal for cleaning or replacement were what caused delays and added expense, because some of the filters would break if accidentally dropped or mishandled.

The researchers had been trying to solve the wrong problem, she says. Dave, now a research affiliate at MIT and CEO of a startup company working on new filter systems, was able to readjust her research focus and develop a potentially more useful set of applications for her work.

But she and her thesis advisor, MIT professor of materials science and engineering Jeffrey Grossman, thought the process they went through might hold important lessons for other researchers about the importance of doing detailed economic analysis and having in-depth conversations with people using the technology that the research is focused on.

Dave, Grossman, and their co-researchers Brent Keller PhD ’16 and Karen Golmer, innovator in residence at MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, have published an account of their experience in this process, using their work on membranes as a case study, in the journal Joule. That paper, Grossman says, is “not about our membrane per se,” though they do discuss the details of its development, but rather it is “our story of bridging the gap between the research and how to commercialize it.” Grossman is the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems.

Dave and Grossman were working on a new approach to desalination by using sheets of specially prepared graphene oxide, which they showed could improve the flow rate through the filter by a hundredfold compared to conventional polymer membranes. That sounded like something that could have a major impact on the efficiency and cost of this expensive process, which is a key source of potable water in many arid parts of the world.

But after conducting 200 interviews with people working in various parts of the desalination industry — a process that was required as part of a National Science Foundation I-Corps grant for the project — the team found that the reality was not so simple. Estimated costs for the new membrane material would represent at least a 50 percent increase over that of existing membranes, when the total costs of plant operation were taken into account.

Read full article: MIT News

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Taxonomy

• Technology
• Desalination
• Sustainable Desalination
• Laboratory Equipment
• Education
• Academic Study
• Desalination
• Laboratory Testing