Heteroatom-doped noble carbon-tailored mixed matrix membranes with ultrapermeability for efficient CO2 separation

Zhihong Tian; Dongyang Li; Weigang Zheng; Qishuo Chang; Yudong Sang; Feili Lai; Jing Wang; Yatao Zhang; Tianxi Liu; Markus Antonietti

doi:10.1039/d3mh00463e

Heteroatom-doped noble carbon-tailored mixed matrix membranes with ultrapermeability for efficient CO₂ separation

Mater Horiz. 2023 Aug 29;10(9):3660-3667. doi: 10.1039/d3mh00463e.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Engineering Research Center for Nanomaterials, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, P. R. China.
² School of Chemical Engineering, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, P. R. China. wang.jing@zzu.edu.cn.
³ Department of Chemistry, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200F, Leuven 3001, Belgium.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Synthetic and Biological Colloids, Ministry of Education, School of Chemical and Material Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, P. R. China.
⁵ Department of Colloid Chemistry, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam 14476, Germany.

PMID: 37350178
DOI: 10.1039/d3mh00463e

Abstract

Membranes with ultrapermeability for CO₂ are desired for future large-scale carbon capture projects, because of their excellent separative productivity and economic efficiency. Herein, we demonstrate that a membrane with ultrapermeability for CO₂ can be constructed by combining N/O para-doped noble carbons, C₂N_xO_1-x, with high-permeability polymer PIM-1. The optimal PIM-1/C₂N_xO_1-x membranes exhibit superior CO₂ permeability (22110 Barrer) with a CO₂/N₂ selectivity of 15.5, and an unprecedented CO₂ permeability of 37272 Barrer can be obtained after a PEG activation treatment, far surpassing the 2008 upper bound. Both broad experiments and molecular dynamics simulations reveal that the numerous ordered polar channels of C₂N_xO_1-x and their excellent compatibility with PIM-1 are responsible for the superior CO₂ separation performance of the membrane. Although this is the first study on C₂N-type gas separation membranes, the outstanding results indicate that noble carbon building blocks may pave a new avenue to advance high-performance CO₂ separation membranes.