The emission of CO2 to the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels has been linked to global climate change. As estimated by the International Energy Agent (IEA), fossil fuels fulfilled 81% of the world energy demand in 2013. Among various CCS approaches, post-combustion CCS is the most urgent one since it can be directly retrofit to existing fossil fuel-fired power generators. Membrane technology has been considered as an economic and energy-saving alternative capture strategy to solvent scrubbing for the mitigation of CO2 from post-combustion exhaust gas (10-14% CO2 with mostly N2). Permeance and selectivity are the two major criteria to evaluate the performance of any CO2 separation membrane system. Therefore, in a practical sense, increased gas permeance without the loss of selectivity has been recognized as an important consideration in achieving a competitive membrane process for CO2 separation. Recently developed continuous assembly of polymers (CAP) is a promising nanotechnology, which enables facial production of nanoscale, cross-linked, defect-free and surface-confined films at both smooth and rough surfaces. By controlling the CAP conditions, we constructed a novel CAP on MOF composite membrane consisting of a micro scale MOF layer and a nano-scale crosslinked polymer selective layer through a bottom-up approach (Figure 1). The CAP on MOF membrane presents an extremely high CO2 permeance of 3,000 GPU with a CO2/N2 selectivity of 34. This performance is well above the boundary of the well-known target area for post-combustion CO2 capture applications and is superior to most of the current existing membranes in the field. The design can be further improved by using better polymer materials for the top layer as well as the introduction of additives in the top layer in future.

Continuous assembly of a polymer on a metal-organic framework

2019 Fall National Meeting

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