Abstract
In this work carbon dioxide selective membrane materials from a commercially available poly(amide-b-ethylene oxide) (Pebax (R), Arkema) blended with polyethylene glycol ethers are presented. The preferred PEG-ether was PEG-dimethylether (PEG-DME). PEG-DME is well known as a physical solvent for acid gas absorption. It is used under the trade name Genosorb (R) in the Selexol (R) process (UOP) for acid gas removal from natural gas and synthesis gas. The combination of the liquid absorbent with the multiblock copolymer resulted in mechanically stable films with superior CO(2) separation properties. The addition of 50 wt.% PEG-DME to the copolymer resulted in a 8-fold increase of the carbon dioxide permeability; the CO(2)/H(2)-selectivity increased simultaneously from 9.1 to 14.9. It is shown that diffusivity as well as solubility of carbon dioxide is strongly increased by the blending of the copolymer with PEG-ethers. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 124-129 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Journal of Membrane Science |
| Volume | 350 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 15 2010 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge support of this work by the Helmholtz Association (HGF Alliance MemBrain). We thank Sabrina Bolmer for the AFM images, Susanne Nowak for the DSC measurements and Carsten Scholles for technical support.