The effect of composition different on the gas permeation properties of tubular membrane

Abstract

Gas separation enhanced a main manufacturing request of membrane technology just through the past 20 years, but the analysis of gas separation essentially started already. For specific gas separation, carbon membrane offer an improvement in permeability and selectivity, due to the excellent separation may be achieved even between gases with almost similar molecular size. Carbon membranes produced from the carbonization of polymeric materials have been reported as an effective process for gas separation due to its ability to separate a gas mixture at any desired temperatures, up to temperature where carbon membrane begins to deteriorate. In this study, tubular supported carbon membrane was prepared using Matrimid 5218 as polymeric precursor.The polymer solution was coated on the surface of ceramic tubes by using dip-coating method. In order to produce a high performance of carbon membrane, the composition different during the carbon membrane fabrication was studied. The polymer tubular membrane was then carbonized under Argon atmosphere at different composition of 5wt%, 10wt%, 13wt%, 15wt%, and 18wt%. Pure gas permeation tests were performed using CO2 and N2 at room temperature with pressure 8 bars. Based on the results, the highest CO2/ N2 selectivity of 79.69 was obtained for carbon membrane prepared with 15wt% polymer composition. In fact, a carbon membrane with composition of 15%wt of Matrimid has higher density compared with others. It shows that the polymer chains formed has increased the packing density of the membranes.