Ultra-selective molecular-sieving gas separation membranes enabled by multi-covalent-crosslinking of microporous polymer blends

Xiuling Chen, Yanfang Fan, Lei Wu, Linzhou Zhang, Dong Guan, Canghai Ma () and Nanwen Li ()
Additional contact information
Xiuling Chen: Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Yanfang Fan: China University of Petroleum-Beijing
Lei Wu: Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Linzhou Zhang: China University of Petroleum-Beijing
Dong Guan: China University of Petroleum-Beijing
Canghai Ma: Dalian University of Technology
Nanwen Li: Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract High-performance membranes exceeding the conventional permeability-selectivity upper bound are attractive for advanced gas separations. In the context microporous polymers have gained increasing attention owing to their exceptional permeability, which, however, demonstrate a moderate selectivity unfavorable for separating similarly sized gas mixtures. Here we report an approach to designing polymeric molecular sieve membranes via multi-covalent-crosslinking of blended bromomethyl polymer of intrinsic microporosity and Tröger’s base, enabling simultaneously high permeability and selectivity. Ultra-selective gas separation is achieved via adjusting reaction temperature, reaction time and the oxygen concentration with occurrences of polymer chain scission, rearrangement and thermal oxidative crosslinking reaction. Upon a thermal treatment at 300 °C for 5 h, membranes exhibit an O2/N2, CO2/CH4 and H2/CH4 selectivity as high as 11.1, 154.5 and 813.6, respectively, transcending the state-of-art upper bounds. The design strategy represents a generalizable approach to creating molecular-sieving polymer membranes with enormous potentials for high-performance separation processes.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26379-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-26379-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26379-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().