Influence of carbonisation temperature on gas permeation properties of matrimid-based carbon membrane

Abstract

The utilisation of tubular support for carbon membrane preparation is beneficial for gas separation by providing high membrane area per unit volume and mechanically stronger than conventional flat substrate. In this study, tubular carbon membrane derived from Matrimid was fabricated via dip-coating method and three different carbonisation temperatures were used in order to produce high performance carbon membrane (600 °C, 750 °C and 850 °C). The physicochemical property of the carbon membrane is highly dependent on the final carbonisation temperature. By increasing carbonisation temperature, it will result in higher micropores and increasing gas pair selectivity. Whereas, low carbonisation temperature constricts pore formation and resulting in lower gas separation properties. The carbon membrane carbonised at 850 °C showed the highest gas separation properties of CO2/CH4 selectivity of 87.30 with CO2 permeance of 287.36 GPU. The resulted membrane is compared with literatures and has highlighted the potential of carbon tubular membrane for future membrane development.