(380i) Separation of Siloxane from Silicone Fluid Mixture Using Polymeric Membrane

Recently, there has been an increasing market demand for silicone fluids with lower cyclic siloxane concentrations. Conventional techniques such as air stripping and volatilization are employed to remove these impurities (e.g., octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane –D4). Still, these thermal-driven methods are energy-intensive and efficient for bulk separation but result in removing lighter linear siloxane components that give the product its important attributes. Membrane separations could serve as alternatives to or complement these industrial separation techniques to reduce the overall process energy demand since they do not involve a phase change. This work presents polymeric membranes as materials in achieving ultra-high purity separation of D4 from silicone fluid mixture. The transport properties are studied to understand the driving force for the separation. This provides an industrially scalable low-cost alternative to silicone fluid purification and lower cyclic siloxane cleansing operations.