(340ao) Study of Water and Organic Co-Transport in Carbon Molecular Sieve Membranes

As emphasized by the recent mRNA sars-cov-2 vaccine scale-up, membrane filtration plays a critical role in pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. ¹ Understanding the transport of complex mixtures of small molecules and water within membranes is an important research area for a variety of separation applications. These applications include produced water treatment, purification of pharmaceutical intermediates in the presence of water², and water removal from black liquor.

Carbon molecular sieve (CMS) materials are a potential candidate for scalable and high-performance reverse osmosis membranes due to their impressive chemical and thermal stabilities. Moreover, they have the potential to enable impressive rejections of even small neutral solutes from water. However, the amorphous nature of the CMS microstructure results in significant difficulties in the use of computational modeling of molecular transport processes. Therefore, an experimental study of water and organic solvent transport in CMS membranes is pursued here. In this work, we investigated the sorption, diffusion, and permeation behavior of organic compounds and water in CMS. The comparison shows how the properties of penetrants such as hydrophilicity and molecular size of permeate affect the transport behavior in CMS. Basic transport and sorption parameters are utilized to estimate how water-organic mixtures will transport in a CMS membrane. Using the multicomponent sorption and transport frameworks based on pure component isotherms, flux equations of water and organic solvent mixture in CMS membranes are developed and compared with the experimental data.

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