(163f) Carbon Molecular Sieve (CMS) Membranes—Meeting Challenges for Diverse Gas Separations

This presentation honors the contributions of Yoram Cohen, a pioneer in dealing with many applications involving diverse aqueous feeds by membrane engineering. My group focuses on diverse gas feeds, rather than aqueous feeds, so we face different challenges. Rather than fouling challenges typical of liquid feeds, the key challenge in gas feeds is to discriminate between size-similar penetrant pairs. Notwithstanding these issues, our gas separation domain challenges also must be overcome by membrane engineering. Herein, CMS membranes are shown to meet this size-discriminating gas separation challenge while maintaining module productivity. Tunable precursor polymer types in asymmetric fibers forms and scalable pyrolysis processes will be shown to deliver high volumetric productivity and size discrimination for diverse feeds. The crucial nature of membrane engineering, therefore, enables molecular separations in both liquid and gas domains, despite different challenges in each domain.