(595e) Separation of Organic Solvents with Uio-66/Matrimid® Dual-Layer Hollow Fiber Membranes

Membrane-based organic solvent separations have the potential to reduce the energy and carbon footprint of existing and emerging processing industries. High-performance membranes will accelerate this transition especially if the membranes can be fabricated in a manner that matches the immense scales of the various processing industries. This work describes the successful fabrication of UiO-66/Matrimid® hollow fiber membranes, subsequent post-treatments, and successful application in organic solvent reverse osmosis separations. The work focused on creating a membrane with high selectivity and permeability through a facile and scalable fabrication process. A dry jet-wet quench method was employed to fabricate mixed matrix hollow fiber membranes containing UiO-66. The fibers were subsequently crosslinked and evaluated via separation of the alkylaromatic solvents toluene and triisopropylbenzene. The crosslinking dramatically improved the membrane stability over extended operating conditions, as expected, but certain modifications from traditional flat sheet crosslinking protocols were needed to realize success in the hollow fiber morphology. The addition of UiO-66 boosted the permeance of the hollow fiber membranes while retaining rejection of triisopropylbenzene. This work demonstrates the successful dual-layer fabrication and post-treatment of mixed matrix hollow fiber membranes for organic solvent reverse osmosis applications.