Zeolite Membranes for Pervaporation
摘要
Membrane-based technologies have been widely used as a promising alternative in comparison with other separation technologies, like distillation and absorption. It is due to their higher efficiency, adaptability, and stability, lower energy demand, (capital, operating, and maintenance cost), simpler operation, and more environmental compatibility. In addition, the abovementioned advantageous provided, tailor made membranes need to be developed to suit the requirements for cost-efficient separation processes like microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF), reverse osmosis (RO), electrodialysis (ED), membrane distillation (MD), membrane bioreactor (MBR), forward osmosis (FO), gas separation (GS), and pervaporation (PV). PV using membrane is an attractive topic for researchers, due to its high capability for separation processes. PV applications can be raised for non-efficient separations such as azeotropic mixtures, solutions with similar boiling points, organic–organic mixtures, and removing traces from aqueous solutions, which cannot be technically and/or economically feasible by conventional separation processes. Membranes for such processes can be made of organic, inorganic, or composite, depending on the separation conditions and nature of precursor materials. Inorganic zeolite membranes mostly have unique properties, such as uniform and well-defined pore structure and uniform microporous channels which can be utilized perfectly for sieving smaller molecules based on their size. Zeolite membranes, as one of the most important type of inorganic membranes, can be either hydrophilic or hydrophobic with an excellent thermal and hydrothermal stability to cover separation of different chemicals with varying properties. Besides, utilization of zeolite membranes can be cost competitive for some processes in industrial scale including PV, since they possess not only higher separation factor and enhanced flux with lower effective area of the membrane (more compact), but also led to reduce the maintenance cost. This chapter provides fundamental aspects of the PV process using zeolite membranes—along with the details of separation mechanism. The advantages for utilization of zeolite membranes have been dealt considering the process economics. Finally, a literature review is presented on PV applications using the low-cost zeolite membranes.