High-performance ammonia-selective MFI nanosheet membranes

Xuekui Duan; Donghun Kim; Katabathini Narasimharao; Shaeel Al-Thabaiti; Michael Tsapatsis

doi:10.1039/d0cc07217f

High-performance ammonia-selective MFI nanosheet membranes

Chem Commun (Camb). 2021 Jan 21;57(5):580-582. doi: 10.1039/d0cc07217f.

Authors

Xuekui Duan¹, Donghun Kim², Katabathini Narasimharao³, Shaeel Al-Thabaiti³, Michael Tsapatsis⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 421 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. tsapa001@umn.edu.
² Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 421 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. tsapa001@umn.edu and School of Chemical Engineering, Chonnam National University, Gwangju 61186, Republic of Korea.
³ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science King Abdulaziz University (KAU), P.O. Box 80203, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 421 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. tsapa001@umn.edu and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering & Institute for NanoBio Technology, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA and Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, USA.

PMID: 33367326
DOI: 10.1039/d0cc07217f

Abstract

Nanosheet-based MFI membranes, known to be highly selective for hydrocarbon isomer separations, exhibit an NH3/N2 mixture separation factor of 2236 with NH3 permeance of 1.1 × 10-6 mol m-2 s-1 Pa-1, and NH3/H2 separation factor of 307 with NH3 permeance of 2.3 × 10-6 mol m-2 s-1 Pa-1 at room temperature. Consistent with a competitive sorption-based separation, lower operating temperatures and higher pressures result in increased separation factor. At 323 K, with an equimolar mixed feed of NH3/N2, the fluxes and separation factors at 3 and 7 bar are 0.13 mol m-2 s-1 and 191, and 0.26 mol m-2 s-1 and 220, respectively. This performance compares favorably with that of other membranes and suggests that MFI membranes can be used in separation and purification processes involving mixtures of NH3/N2/H2 encountered in ammonia synthesis and utilization. The membranes also exhibit high performance for the separation of ethane, n-propane and n-butane from H2.