Reported by: Hua Gong
Translated by: Han Jie
Edited by: Garrick Jones
The member of the State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resources and Environment, Professor Shao Lu from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, whose seminar has made important breakthrough in the study of carbon dioxide (CO2) separation membrane. The results are published online at Energy & Environmental Science. Energy & Environmental Science is one of the top journals in the field of energy and environmental sciences, whose latest impact factor has reached 25.427. HIT is the only institution for the paper. There are three authors, and the first and the second author are Dr. Jiang Xu and Dr. Li Songwei respectively.
Human activities inevitably produce carbon emissions, which lead to an increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and what follows next is the greenhouse effect and ocean acidification, etc., which has a serious impact on our living environment. Therefore, the low-carbon technology will effectively enhance our country's international competitiveness. Membrane separation technology is a new low-carbon technology which is expected to achieve efficient separation of CO2 now. Compared to the traditional method, our separation is efficient, easy to operate, low cost and environmentally friendly. The development and use of advanced gas separation technology to capture large-scale greenhouse gases, can not only effectively alleviate global warming, but also can purify energy products like syngas, biogas and natural gas. However, efficient CO2 separation membrane material is still in short supply currently, which could restrict the application of membrane separation in the field of CO2 capture and separation.
As the leader of the seminar, Professor Shao Lu has long committed himself to gas separation, nanofiltration, ultrafiltration and other high-performance separation membrane research. Semi-interpenetrating network (SIPN) membranes with unprecedentedly high CO2 permeability were designed and synthesized simply through one-step, UV-induced radical polymerization. The in situ embedment of linear polyethylene glycol as a “CO2 transport promoter” in membranes can dramatically enhance both CO2 solubility and diffusivity to push SIPN membrane performance beyond Robeson's upper bound line. This extremely facile performance-manipulating strategy establishes our CO2-philic SIPN membranes as an exciting platform for sustainable CO2 separations.
According to Professor Shao Lu, low molecular weight PEO segments effectively increase the free volume of the membrane, improve its distribution and enhance the CO2 affinity, which could promote the rapid passage of CO2 in the membrane and greatly improve the permeation of CO2 at the same time, so that the membrane maintains a high selectivity. Therefore, we breakthrough the bottleneck of inter-constraint between membrane material permeation and selectivity, and we have reached to the highest level of CO2 affinity separation membrane in the world currently. The preparation of the semi-interpenetrating network separation membrane method is extremely simple and environmentally friendly with excellent stability and is expected to match well with the industrial manufacturing process. The research ideas of this result have established an efficient design method for the development of advanced membrane materials and its application in the field of environmental energy.
Link to the paper:http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/ee/c6ee03566c#!divAbstract
