Highly selective polymeric membranes for gas separation

Polymeric membranes have gained an important place in chemical technology and are used in a broad range of applications. The key property that is exploited is the ability of a membrane to control the permeation rate of a chemical species through the membrane. The goal is to allow one component of a mixture to permeate the membrane freely, while hindering permeation of other component. To accomplish this, we proposed a novel concept of a (universal) ‘organic molecular sieve’ and experimentally proved its possibility by showing that organic polymer molecules at the interface between the permeable phase and the impermeable phase play the role of molecular sieves. This resulted in a significantly improved selectivity in gas separation, in fact going over the so-called ‘upper-bound’ sought for the past 30 years by many researchers but without much success. Since, this is not size selective like an inorganic molecular sieve but diffusion selective (the compatibilizer works like a molecular sieve to separate one gas molecules from the other), it can be used for the preparation of polymeric membranes for separation of any gas molecules pair. Because of polymer processability, this method is quite promising for the continuous mass production of polymeric membranes for real applications, especially when the polymers are insoluble to common solvents so that solution based techniques are hard to apply. This strategy can be applicable to various separation processes of many chemicals and gases.