(363a) Perspectives on Development of Membranes for Vapor Separation Applications

Over its 35 year history, MTR has commercialized a number of new membrane applications and materials. In particular, MTR has been a pioneer in the use of vapor or solubility-selective membranes for industrial separations. This experience has provided many lessons learned on the challenges of bringing a new membrane technology to a market. This presentation will discuss some of these issues through the lens of MTR’s history in the petrochemical and natural gas industries. Topics to be covered include:

• The development history of MTR’s VaporSep and FuelSep membranes for olefin recovery and fuel gas conditioning, and insights on what makes a good membrane process design.

• A discussion on the qualities of a useful industrial membrane. Academic literature focuses heavily on new materials with better permeabilities and selectivities in an ongoing quest to exceed the upper bound. On the other hand, industry is less concerned with spectacular pure gas performance, but rather concentrates on processable materials with adequate mixture transport properties that can be reproducibly fabricated at large scale into robust, stable, low-cost membranes.

• Comments on membrane device versus film data; pure gas film measurements are a useful starting place for fundamental material understanding. However, this is the very beginning of the membrane development process. Testing of asymmetric/composite membranes in module form at expected operating conditions is crucial to understand how device and process issues dictate achievable performance. This information is useful to guide materials development.

Ideally discussion of these issues can help accelerate the introduction of next-generation membranes and the use of such membranes in new applications.