UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology

Focused electro-disinfection of Cryptosporidium
Hans Coster, Lutz Gaedt, Virginia Shepherd, Jane Taylor-Flemons, Leonard Coster and Terry Chilcott - in collaboration with Water Corporation of Western Australia

Focused-electro-disinfection is an alternative water disinfection treatment to the conventional chemical, radiation and filtration treatments that are either uneconomical to maintain in large-scale municipal water treatment plants or, in the case of chemical and radiation treatments, produce unwanted by-products. The project has highlighted the need for a reliable indicator of disinfection efficacy. We are investigating biological and electro-rotational methods.

Passive molecular sensing technology
Hans Coster, Terry Chilcott and Till Böcking

Existing biosensor technologies rely on the presence of the targeted molecules to initiate a cascade reaction eventually producing a change in a physical parameter such as colour, pH or electric current, potential or conductance, that can be readily observed and digitally quantified.

However, they are slow, complicated and labour intensive, making them commensurately expensive. Passive molecular sensing does not require chemical modification or processing of the targeted molecules or components of the sensor. It revolves around detecting the differences between bound and the unbound states of targeted molecules via changes in electric polarisation, allowing the development of simple, robust, rapid and inexpensive biosensors for use in pathology.

Tethered bilayer system
Hans Coster, Till Böcking and Terry Chilcott

Bilayers are membranes reconstituted from lipids extracted from biological membranes. They are model experimental systems for studying, in isolation, the multitude of functions that biological membranes perform. The novel features of our proposed tethered bilayer system are that the bilayer will be highly stable, of known area and accessible on both sides to electrolytes. Most significantly the later feature facilitates four terminal ultra low frequency electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements that have been shown to resolve the molecular and dielectric structure of bilayers to a 0.1 nm resolution.

Electrical impedance tomography
Hans Coster, Terry Chilcott and Johan Noor

An electrical impedance spectroscopy project has commenced exploring the high phase-resolution capacity of our spectrometer to image anatomical and physiological features of the body.