Ethanol/Water Biomass Feedstock Separation Through Inorganic A-Type Zeolite Membrane on Thin Porous Ni Sheet Support | AIChE

Ethanol/Water Biomass Feedstock Separation Through Inorganic A-Type Zeolite Membrane on Thin Porous Ni Sheet Support

Type

Conference Presentation

Conference Type

AIChE Annual Meeting

Presentation Date

October 17, 2011

Duration

30 minutes

Skill Level

Intermediate

PDHs

0.50

Bio-Ethanol/water separation by fractional distillation becomes a popular industrial process to remove water from ethanol-water mixture. However, the mixture of 95.6wt% ethanol and 4.4 wt% water is an azeotrope and cannot be further purified by distillation. Alternatively, this can be achieved by membrane separation technology since it is not works on vapor-liquid equilibrium but on pervaporation mode.

In this work, real ethanol feeds (rectifier bottom, 40 wt%, PH=3.99 and rectifier overhead, 95wt%, PH=4.54) from Pacific Ethanol Inc. were chosen to test the performance and stability of A type zeolite membrane (2~3um), which supported on novel thin porous Ni sheet substrate (~50um). The preliminary results shows that NaA zeolite membrane was unstable at operation condition (~100C), mainly due to the strong acidity of real ethanol-water biomass feedstock (PH≈4).

However, after neutralized with 0.1M NaOH solution to PH=8.5 or by pass a guard bed filled with weak base ion exchange resin (Amberlite@IRA-93), this novel membrane shows high performance (Water flux >2 kg/m2 h, water/ethanol selectivity > 5000) and stability (>100hrs). ICP analysis result also shows that sodium and sulfur ions will remains in the feed side during the separation process, mainly due to their large hydrated diameter (~7.2 Å for Na+ and ~8.6 Å for SO42-) comparing with the pore size of NaA zeolite membrane. (~4Å)



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