Membranes for carbon capture have improved significantly with various promoters such as amines and fillers that enhance their overall permeance and selectivity toward a certain particular gas. They require nominal energy input and can achieve bulk separations with lower capital investment. The results of an experiment-based membrane study can be suitably extended for techno-economic analysis and simulation studies, if its process parameters are interconnected to various membrane performance indicators such as permeance for different gases and their selectivity. The conventional modelling approaches for membranes cannot interconnect desired values into a single model. Therefore, such models can be suitably applicable to a particular parameter but would fail for another process parameter. With the help of artificial neural networks, the current study connects the concentrations of various membrane materials (polymer, amine, and filler) and the partial pressures of carbon dioxide and methane to simultaneously correlate three desired outputs in a single model: CO2 permeance, CH4 permeance, and CO2/CH4 selectivity. These parameters help predict membrane performance and guide secondary parameters such as membrane life, efficiency, and product purity. The model results agree with the experimental values for a selected membrane, with an average absolute relative error of 6.1%, 4.2%, and 3.2% for CO2 permeance, CH4 permeance, and CO2/CH4 selectivity, respectively. The results indicate that the model can predict values at other membrane development conditions.
Keywords: carbon dioxide removal; facilitated transport membranes; mixed matrix membranes; neural network modeling.