Brian L. Bischoff

Superhydrophobic and superhydrophilic surface-enhanced separation performance of porous inorganic membranes for biomass-to-biofuel conversion applications

ABSTRACT A new class of porous membranes is introduced to provide unique separation mechanisms by surface interactions and capillary condensation. High-performance architectural surface selective (HiPAS) membranes were designed for high perm-selective flux and high-temperature tolerance for hot vapor processing and liquid processing. Due to surface-enhanced selectivity, larger-fluxes were achieved by utilizing larger pore sizes (~8 nm for vapor phase and micron-sized pores for liquid phase separations). This article describes a membrane-based separation concept for biomass conversion pathways and demonstrates the initial data for selective permeation of toluene–water and toluene–phenol–water relevant to biofuel processing.

Surface-Engineered Inorganic Nanoporous Membranes for Vapor and Pervaporative Separations of Water–Ethanol Mixtures

Surface wettability-tailored porous ceramic/metallic membranes (in the tubular and planar disc form) were prepared and studied for both vapor-phase separation and liquid pervaporative separations of water-ethanol mixtures. Superhydrophobic nanoceramic membranes demonstrated more selective permeation of ethanol (relative to water) by cross-flow pervaporation of liquid ethanol–water mixture (10 wt % ethanol feed at 80 °C). In addition, both superhydrophilic and superhydrophobic membranes were tested for the vapor-phase separations of water–ethanol mixtures. Porous inorganic membranes having relatively large nanopores (up to 8-nm) demonstrated good separation selectivity with higher permeation flux through a non-molecular-sieving mechanism. Due to surface-enhanced separation selectivity, larger nanopore-sized membranes (~5–100 nm) can be employed for both pervaporation and vapor phase separations to obtain higher selectivity (e.g., permselectivity for ethanol of 13.9 during pervaporation and a vapor phase separation factor of 1.6), with higher flux due to larger nanopores than the traditional size-exclusion membranes (e.g., inorganic zeolite-based membranes having sub-nanometer pores). The prepared superhydrophobic porous inorganic membranes in this work showed good thermal stability (i.e., the large contact angle remains the same after 300 °C for 4 h) and chemical stability to ethanol, while the silica-textured superhydrophilic surfaced membranes can tolerate even higher temperatures. These surface-engineered metallic/ceramic nanoporous membranes should have better high-temperature tolerance for hot vapor processing than those reported for polymeric membranes.