Gutter Film

[Deandra Uleman]

The first of the Strictly Trilogy, the all-street MOST GUTTER, just dropped marking the beginning of the highly anticipated rollout of films from the prodigious crew. Strictly have already smashed it this year and the films have only just begun dropping. Riders Calvin Barrett and Parker Norvell released signature Icelantic X Strictly pro models - as well as Sam Zahner with J Skis - and the crew has hosted an array of highly successful premieres in the run-up to the season, getting the homies stoked.

Strictly left the ranks of the 'up-and-comers' a while back but this winter seems like a pretty special one. There are the aforementioned pro models; then there are three films that come together to collectively showcase one of the most talented groups of skiers out there. The three films are very different; Most Gutter (street), Wildcard (backcountry) and August Light (Have A Nice Day) which is just good skiing and good vibes.

Another driver of that fresh feeling is the fact that Calvin, Sam, and Pete took the reins from Gavin Rudy and Andrew Mildenberger on the creative side, while still borrowing some of their expertise. They produced the film themselves, meaning we get a different feel in this Strictly piece than the others.

Community support and crowdfunding got this one going big time as well. With the GoFundMe providing the wheels for the trip - another great example of the community helping to drive sick content by putting money behind projects.

The final Strictly movie to drop will be August Light (Have A Nice Day) and it's more of a fun-filled and entertainment heavy type of ski movie. It feels heavily influenced by Ethan Swadburg when it comes to the sense of humor of the piece. No bad thing in my opinion.

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Membrane technology has been widely used for water purification and gas separation, due to its inherent advantages over conventional separation technologies, such as high energy efficiency, simplicity in operation, compactness and ease of scale-up1,2,3,4. Membrane processes have emerged as the leading technology for seawater desalination, nitrogen enrichment from air and CO2 removal from natural gas1. Membranes also provide an attractive alternative for emerging applications such as CO2 capture from coal power plant-derived flue gas and syngas5,6,7 and water reuse from hydraulic fracking-produced water8. The key to the success of membrane technology is ultrathin film composite membranes with high permeance, resulting in the low capital cost for membrane systems. However, despite of their commercial importance, relatively few theoretical studies have been reported that focus on the rational design of ultrathin film composite membranes. In this paper we demonstrate a 3D modeling approach that provides fundamental understanding and enables the design and optimization of multilayered ultrathin composite membrane structures that achieve high permeance and selectivity.

Membranes should have high selectivity to achieve the required product purity and high permeance to reduce the required membrane area that often scales linearly with the capital cost of the membrane system4,5. As indicated by Eq. 1, the permeance can be enhanced by molecularly designing selective layer materials to achieve superior permeability13,14,15,16,17, or by decreasing leff. At first glance, it appears that the most straightforward way to increase the permeance is to reduce leff, by reducing the selective layer thickness ls18,19,20,21,22. However, as the thickness of the selective layer is reduced and becomes comparable to the surface pore size of the porous support, the surface morphology of the support (porosity and pore size) geometrically restricts penetrant diffusion in the selective layer, which greatly reduces permeance10,18,19. Specifically, the geometric restriction increases the effective diffusion length leff for the penetrant as indicated by the curved red arrows shown in Fig. 1a. This leads to a non-linear penetrant concentration profile and a corresponding reduction in flux NA and thus permeance18,20. The effect of the support surface morphology on penetrant permeance has been rationalized to some extent using both analytical models19,21,22,23,24,25 and numerical modeling that describes the concentration profile and flux within the selective layer10,25,26. However, this prior work was limited to conventional two layer membrane structures as shown in Fig. 1a.

The steady-state transport of penetrant A is obtained by solving Eq. 2 subject to appropriate boundary conditions. The penetrant concentration is assumed to be continuous at the interface between the selective and gutter layers for the simplicity of analysis10. At steady state, the flux is constant in the selective and gutter layers:

where is the diffusion coefficient for penetrant A and the subscripts of s and g indicate the selective and gutter layers, respectively. The nonporous region of the porous support is assumed to be impermeable and there is also zero-flux of the penetrant in the x and y direction through the sides of the unit cell because symmetry conditions are imposed at these boundaries.

The computational model predicts the concentration profile in the selective and gutter layers and the resulting flux NA across the composite membrane. The geometric restriction of the membrane nano-features on the observed permeance of penetrant A can be characterized as membrane permeance efficiency, βA:

where is the membrane permeance modeled and is the ideal permeance of the selective layer without the influence of the gutter layer and porous support (i.e., and ). Lower values indicate greater deviation from the ideal permeance, reflecting more severe effect from the gutter layer and/or the porous support on the gas permeation.

Figures 4c,d also illustrates the benefits of using a gutter layer. With the gutter layer, the diffusion streamlines are almost parrallel to the gas permeation direction in the selective layer where the major transport resistance lies, while the bending of the diffusion streamline is mainly in the gutter layer. On the other hand, if there was no gutter layer, the streamline in the selective layer would be almost the same as that in the gutter layer, which is much longer than the film thickness due to the restriction from the porous support.

To provide a quantitative guidance of selecting the gutter layer materials, we performed simulations using a gutter layer with various permeability values. The scaled gutter layer thickness (G) is set at 1 for all simulations, because it yields the highest permeance efficiency among those considered. Figure 6a shows the effect of the ideal permeance ratio of the gutter layer to the selective layer (i.e., ) on the membrane permeance efficiency. The permeance efficiency increases with increasing the support porosity and values.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of this work by the Korean Carbon Capture and Sequestration R&D Center and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. We also like to thank Dr. Hans Wijmans at Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. for his comments and suggestions.

M.K. and K.P. conducted the computational simulations and prepared Figures 4. L.Z. and W.J. prepared Figures 1, 2 and 3 and provided interpretation on the gas permeation data. H.L. and E.F. planned the research effort and analyzed the data. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Calvin: On that note, shoutout to Jack Pepper and Patrick Ring for pulling through and helping us film this year. Those two guys came on trips with us, and they really pulled through and made those trips extra special because we got those third angles, and it made a huge difference.

Transitions are an extremely important element within comic books and also very important within film. In relation to comic books, McCloud states that there are six forms of transitions: moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect and non-sequitor.

Aspect-to-aspect transitions: Bypasses time and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood. Often used to establish mood or a sense of a place when time stands still. Encourages the reader to assemble a single moment using the scattered fragments presented.

Interpretations are often guided by the artist of filmmaker, however the less guidance given the more elastic interpretations can be. Some artists are deliberately ambiguous, only giving us a small piece of the puzzle. Sometimes, this ambiguity can lead to something wonderful happening in the spaces left between, for there is nothing more imaginative then never ending possibilities.

Filled with reviews, comics, essays, interviews and while illustrated and hand-lettered, Gutter Hunter retains the aesthetic of the work it focuses on. Many of these are comics made by outsiders, outlaws, and oddballs, and most of the stories here have NEVER BEEN TOLD BEFORE in any magazine.

I have, for 25 years, been peering my investigative eye towards this very topic, but where it resides in the history of cult movies. In the book and magazine series of Cinema Sewer I've been uncovering and unearthing the behind-the-scenes dirt on the making of cult films, tracking down the people that made these cinematic marvels, and getting them to tell their stories. Now I'm turning that same eye, that very same writing style and focusing it on a road even less travelled: on the disrespected, underappreciated, and misunderstood history of indy comix.

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