Dear Colleagues,

The development of functional nanocomposite membranes is one of the promising areas of modification of membrane materials for solving unique problems of gas and liquid separation and purification in petrochemistry, medicine, food production, the processing of household and industrial waste, etc. Currently, a fairly large quantity of experimental data has been collected on the unique transport and separation properties of polymer membranes with embedded particles or agglomerates of nanometer size. At the same time, most of the results are explicable within the framework of existing models and the change in properties correlates with the properties and the amount of the embedded phase.

However, there are membrane materials in which nonlinear changes in properties are observed and which cannot be explained consistently within the framework of existing approaches (for example, Maxwell's models, Kahn–Jones–Nair, etc.). The study of such nonlinear threshold phenomena allows us to obtain answers to fundamental questions about the mechanisms of transport in inhomogeneous, disordered media.

Some progress in this field of research has been achieved thanks to applying percolation and fractal approaches to the description of such structures (for example, the Shen and Kripatrick models, etc.). However, some successful publications do not give a complete picture of the causes of such deviations. The purpose of this Special Issue is to publish modern experimental results and models of anomalous effects during separation in nanocomposite membranes. In particular, we are interested in studies in which the influence of anisotropic effects, dimensional and threshold changes in properties, the nonlinear sensitivity of systems, and hysteresis phenomena are studied.

These publications will allow us to assess the limits of applicability and possible development of the direction for the creation of new functional nanocomposite membranes.

Dr. Alexey Grekhov
Dr. Alexey Volkov
Dr. Yury Eremin
Guest Editors

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• percolation structures
• nonlinear effects
• synergetic effect
• nanostructures
• topologically inhomogeneous structures
• nonlinear effects
• low-dimensional systems
• nonlinear transport properties
• separation of liquids and gases
• diffusion in inhomogeneous media