2024 AIChE Annual Meeting
Metal-Embedded Carbon Molecular Sieve Membranes for Sustainable Ammonia Production
The research pertaining to this poster presentation is focused on developing a metal-embedded carbon molecular sieve (CMS) based catalytic membrane reactor for sustainable ammonia (NH3) synthesis. In industry, it is most commonly produced via the Haber-Bosch process, a highly energy intensive process and by itself accounts for ~1.8% to global CO2 emissions. Catalytic membranes allow the potential to reduce energy consumption and ensure high yields of NH3. CMS membranes, synthesized via polyimide precursors subject to high temperature pyrolysis, have been studied as high-performance gas separation membranes. In this work, the range of application will be extended beyond to reactive separation by linking fluorinated-copolyimides and iron in membrane structure. The embedded metal acts as a catalytic site while the CMS membrane itself enables their special structure for separation of NH3 (2.6 A°) from similar-sized gas H2 (2.9 A°) and N2 (3.6 A°) molecules. To synthesize these membranes, we analyze various metal incorporation techniques and conditions, as well as characterize these materials based on sorption and catalyst performance. The separation properties will be reported in sorption coefficients for NH3, N2 and H2 by using different methods of making metal-embedded CMS membranes. These results will be used to elucidate the morphological structure of CMS as there are currently no other characterization methods that can analyze these structures.