Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Membrane technology offers substantial economic and environmental benefits for energy‐intensive chemical separations. Chabazite‐type zeolite, possessing a 3‐D channel system with molecular‐sieving windows, can be an ideal membrane material, but conditions to synthesize zeolite‐only membranes limit optimization strategies. Guided by advanced quantum chemistry calculations on inner‐pore molecular interactions, zeolite properties are tailored for different separations and optimized particles incorporated in polyimide at very high loadings. A membrane platform is thus created that largely outperforms state‐of‐the‐art membranes for a broad variety of industry‐relevant applications, that is, carbon capture, natural gas/biogas purification, hydrocarbon, helium and hydrogen recovery. Accurate size‐sieving of gas molecules is realized together with rational determination of optimal gas‐zeolite interactions. Crucial for industrial applications, these well‐tuned membranes displayed excellent non‐aging properties, high flexibility and higher mixed‐gas selectivities than ideal‐gas selectivities. Moreover, they performed even better at low CO 2 ‐partial pressure in CO 2 ‐removal and can be made humidity‐insensitive.
Source: Advanced Materials
Authors: Xiaoyu Tan, Sven Robijns, Aran Lamaire, Ruben Goeminne, Niels De Witte, Marcel Dickmann, Rhea Verbeke, Tom Van der Donck, Rodrigo de Oliveira Silva, Quanli Ke, Yun Li, Imran Aslam, Cédric Van Goethem, Thibaut Donckels, Ricardo Helm, Dimitrios Sakellariou, Tom Van Assche, Veronique Van Speybroeck, Michiel Dusselier, Ivo F. J. Vankelecom
Language: English
Subfield: Mechanical Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: G1062307057, G1745141687, G2233101102, G4737368549, SACReZ: Structure-adsorption-catalysis relations via zeolite topology tuning - a fundamental dive in confinement and diffusion in the context of CO2-to-olefins, G563568445, Controlling Al-distribution in small-pore zeolites: Impact on adsorption and cyclic separation, G7512271199, Ultra-high-performance zeolite-filled membranes for gas and liquid separations
OpenAlex ID: W4411282077