Pervaporation separation of methyl tert‐butyl ether/methanol mixtures using a high‐performance blended membrane

Abstract

For the separation of methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) and methanol mixtures, we investigated the pervaporation performance of a blend membrane made from cellulose acetate and cellulose acetate hydrogen phthalate. At first the influence of the blend composition was studied with a certain feed mixture. We found that all the tested membranes permeate methanol preferentially. The selectivity increases and the permeation rate decreases with increasing cellulose acetate content in the blend. Therefore, an optimal blend composition of 30 wt % in cellulose acetate was chosen to evaluate the influence of the feed composition and the experimental temperature on the pervaporation performance. When the feed temperature or the methanol content in the feed increases, the permeation rates are greatly enhanced and the selectivity decreases. However, the temperature effect is more significant at low methanol content in the feed and becomes negligible at high methanol content in the feed where plasticity effects prevail. A comparison, carried out with all the membranes until now used for the separation of MTBE/methanol mixtures, showed that the blended membrane studied in this present work presents good permselective properties.

Pervaporation separation of MeOH/MTBE mixtures with modified PEEK membrane: Effect of operating conditions

“…5 confirm the MeOH contribution to the flux raise. Furthermore, MTBE penetrates easier into the swollen membrane in the plasticized state [8,10]. Therefore, the partial flux of this component did not decrease too much at lower MTBE concentrations.…”

“…The most studied polymers for MeOH/MTBE separation include cellulose acetate (CA) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] and poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) [12][13][14][15][16][17] and their polymeric blends. The main advantage of such polymers in this separation is their high hydrophilicity.…”

Enhanced desulfurization performance and swelling resistance of asymmetric hydrophilic pervaporation membrane prepared through surface segregation technique

“…The inherent disadvantage of this approach is the high swelling of the membrane at high concentrations of the permeating components, which may deteriorate the selectivity of the membrane and accelerate chemical degradation at high temperatures and pressures. To address this problem, researchers have fabricated many kinds of crosslinked [24], blended [25][26][27], and organic-inorganic hybrid [28] membranes. However, it is reasonable to presume that if the components in the organic-organic mixture exhibited notable difference in hydrophilicity, hydrophilic polymer materials may serve as novel and promising alternative to inhibit the swelling of the membrane.…”

Exploring Torlon/P84 co-polyamide-imide blended hollow fibers and their chemical cross-linking modifications for pervaporation dehydration of isopropanol

“…Thus, appropriate selection of polymeric material, which has superior separation performance and minimal solvent-induced swelling, is a crucial parameter. Generally, four modification approaches have been proposed to improve membrane stability and obtain high separation efficiencies, such as: (1) chemical cross-linking/grafting [2][3][4][5][6][7][8], blending [9,10], heat treatment [2,3,11,12], and the introduction of robust inorganic fillers [13][14][15].…”