(377g) Amine-Containing Membranes with Functionalized Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes for CO2/H2 Separation
AIChE Annual Meeting
2021
2021 Annual Meeting
Separations Division
Highly Selective Separations with Membranes II
Tuesday, November 9, 2021 - 5:00pm to 5:15pm
At 107 °C and 0.2-MPa feed pressure, the membrane incorporated with 10 wt.% AF-MWNTs showed a CO2 permeability of 3196 Barrer and a CO2/H2 selectivity of 205, which were slightly lower than those of the membrane without the nanofiller due to the reduced amine concentration of the AF-MWNTs. At 1.5-MPa feed pressure, the same membrane exhibited the best transport performance, showing a CO2 permeability of 776 Barrer and a CO2/H2 selectivity of 31, owing to the reinforcement effect of the AF-MWNTs against membrane compaction under the high pressure. However, both the CO2 permeability and CO2/H2 selectivity were lower, which was due to the carrier saturation phenomenon. Furthermore, the incorporation of 10 wt.% AF-MWNTs led to a significant improvement on membrane stability. The transport performance and selective layer thickness of this membrane maintained for 100 h, which suggested that the incorporation of AF-MWNTs improved the resistance to membrane compaction upon a high feed pressure. In addition, the representative transport performances of all membranes under 0.2-MPa and 1.5-MPa feed pressures well surpassed the theoretical upper bound. Therefore, this work is considered as one of the crucial steps to enable the application of facilitated transport membranes to high-pressure gas processing such as syngas purification.