W. Richard Bowen and Nidal Hilal 4

C H A P T E R
10
Future Prospects
The preceding chapters have shown that the use of AFM has already
made substantial contributions to understanding and improving processes
across a wide range of engineering. The literature on such applications is
very extensive, so the aim of the present book has been to focus on some
key examples in depth rather than to attempt a comprehensive overview,
which would necessarily have been either unreasonably lengthy or else
unsatisfyingly superficial. It is our hope that we have given an account of
the principles, achievements and possibilities of AFM that is sufficiently
informative for experts in other areas of process engineering to envisage
how their own work may be enhanced using the techniques described.
Owing to the broadness of the field, it is difficult to envisage where the
most important developments are likely to take place in the future. However,
we have asked the authors of the preceding chapters to give a brief
account as to how they would see the use of AFM in their own specialties
developing, with the following results.
The importance of AFM lies in its capability to provide better understanding
of materials’ structure, surface characteristics and the interactive
forces at the meso- and nanoscale level. This will greatly help understand
large-scale engineering processes, especially as materials are increasingly
being designed down to the submicrometre level. The developments of
colloid, coated-colloid and cell probe techniques have already opened
new windows of applications to a variety of engineering processes including
those involving bubbles, such as flotation, and processes within the
biotechnology sector. For example, characterisation of membrane surface
morphology and forces of interaction with colloidal particles and cells
has facilitated the development of synthetic membranes with greatly
improved process-separation characteristics. As synthetic membranes play
a key role in water treatment, including desalination, such use of AFM is
likely to be an increasingly important application. Similarly, AFM studies
of particle-bubble interactions can play a major role in optimising mineral
separations, one of the largest-scale of all process operations. However,
Atomic Force Microscopy in Process Engineering 275
© 2009, Elsevier Ltd