Hydrophobic polyamide nanofilms provide rapid transport for crude oil separation

Abstract

Hydrocarbon separation relies on energy-intensive distillation. Membrane technology can offer an energy-efficient alternative but requires selective differentiation of crude oil molecules with rapid liquid transport. We synthesized multiblock oligomer amines, which comprised a central amine segment with two hydrophobic oligomer blocks, and used them to fabricate hydrophobic polyamide nanofilms by interfacial polymerization from self-assembled vesicles. These polyamide nanofilms provide transport of hydrophobic liquids more than 100 times faster than that of conventional hydrophilic counterparts. In the fractionation of light crude oil, manipulation of the film thickness down to ~10 nanometers achieves permeance one order of magnitude higher than that of current state-of-the-art hydrophobic membranes while retaining comparable size- and class-based separation. This high permeance can markedly reduce plant footprint, which expands the potential for using membranes made of ultrathin nanofilms in crude oil fractionation.

Data-driven predictions of complex mixture permeation in polymer membranes

“…Effective fractionation of highly complex mixtures such as crude oils (which typically contain >60,000 components) has been highlighted in several recent studies. [4][5][6][7] We utilized the data-driven transport model developed here to predict the separation of two whole crude oils (Permian crude oil and Arabian Light crude oil). To achieve this, ~400 of the most abundant molecules in the crude oils were chosen, and the diffusivities and solubilities of these molecules in two polymers (SBAD-1 and DUCKY-9) were generated using our ML models.…”

“…4,5 Additionally, Chisca et al, and Li et al have recently highlighted the ability of crosslinked polymer networks to separate light and heavy crude oils with good fluxes and selectivity. 6,7 This type of "fractionation" (or splitting) is attractive when hybridized with existing separation technologies (e.g., distillation) for hydrocarbon separations, and has the potential to enable the fractionation of biobased complex mixtures such as biocrude oils, crude tall oils, and others.…”

Metal–Phenolic Acid Networks Enable Nanofiltration Membranes for Rapid and Precise Molecular Separation

“…Membrane separation has long been considered to be a process with high efficiency and low energy consumption in various fields such as water purification, , solvent recovery, crude oil separation, and gas separation. , Molecular sieving membranes such as nanofiltration membranes have attracted considerable interest over the past several decades due to their potential for rejecting multivalent ions and small organic molecules. As an important branch of nanofiltration membranes, loose nanofiltration membranes have been developed to reject larger organic molecules such as dyes, − antibiotics, , pharmaceutically active compounds, , traditional Chinese medicines, and humic acids, while allowing inorganic ions to pass through freely, thus showing potential for the separation of organic molecules and inorganic salts. − This enables the recovery of inorganic salts from high-salt dyeing wastewater or avoids the discharge of harmful substances such as antibiotics into water.…”

“…Membrane separation has long been considered to be a process with high efficiency and low energy consumption in various fields such as water purification, 1,2 solvent recovery, 2 crude oil separation, 3 and gas separation. 4,5 Molecular sieving membranes such as nanofiltration membranes have attracted considerable interest over the past several decades due to their potential for rejecting multivalent ions and small organic molecules.…”

Superhydrophobic and Conductive Wire Membrane for Enhanced CO2 Electroreduction to Multicarbon Products

“…To improve the CO 2 reduction performance, substantial efforts have been put into exploring strategies from various perspectives, such as catalyst composition and structure, [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] local microenvironment, [8,[20][21][22] and electrodes. [23][24][25] Recently, hydrophobicity has attracted intense attention for its significant promoting effects in various fields, such as batteries, [26,27] separation, [28,29] and catalysis. [4,8,21,25,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40] For electrochemical CO 2 reduction in aqueous media, the introduction of hydrophobicity can create gas-liquid-solid triple-phase interfaces (TPI) near the catalysts, which increases the local concentration of CO 2 and reduces the accessibility of water to the catalysts, [4,8,21,33] thus improving the selectivity towards carbon-based products.…”