Asymmetric tubular alumina-supported poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) and poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP) membranes were created and characterized by pervaporation separation of binary mixtures of methanol and methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE). The active separation layer was created by free-radical graft polymerization of PVAc and PVP onto a vinylsilane-modified alumina substrate with an average native p...

The development of processes based on the integration of new technologies is of growing interest to industrial catalysis. Recently, significant efforts have been focused on the design of catalytic membrane reactors to improve process performance. In particular, the use of membranes, that allow a selective permeation of water from the reaction mixture, positively affects the reaction evolution b...

This paper considers the relative merits of three optimization objective functions for the design of an energy efficient pervaporation membrane network for ethanol dehydration: the minimization of the standard deviation of the thermodynamic driving force, of the entropy generation, and of the power of separation. The resulting designs are compared with those of a standard numerical optimization...

Recovery of ammonia (NH3) from residual waters offers various reuse opportunities, such as the production fertilisers and generation electricity heat. However, simultaneous evaporation water (H2O) during NH3 stripping under vacuum results in diluted recovered gas with high H2O contents. Whereas porous gas-permeable membranes are already used for stripping, use non-porous silica-based pervaporat...

In this paper, we address the conceptual design of the bioethanol process from switchgrass via gasification. A superstructure is postulated for optimizing energy use that embeds direct or indirect gasification, followed by steam reforming or partial oxidation. Next, the gas composition is adjusted with membrane-PSA or water gas shift. Membrane separation, absorption with ethanol-amines and PSA ...

Mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) are attracting significant interest for pervaporation and gas separation applications. To better comprehend the impact of filler particles within polymer matrices, the species permeation mass transport was theoretically studied by numerical simulation using finite differences. The Fick’s second law of diffusion was solved for a three-dimensional MMM to obtain the c...

SILICONE1200 is an inexpensive domestic poly (dimethylsiloxane)-based sealer that was used in this study to remove volatile organic compounds from over-saturated water using the pervaporation technique. A series of liquid representing important part polluting products released every day were chosen for study. These alkyl halides (chloroform), aromatics (toluene), aliphatic hydrocarbons (heptane...