While coal gasification is a promising method of hydrogen production because of abundant coal reserves and low price, an efficient method to purify the hydrogen steam is an important step for industrial application. Polymeric membrane separation is an economical process for gas purification but typically focus on diffusion based separations that are not appropriate for selectively permeating CO2 relative to H2 and CO. Therefore, new membrane materials have been designed using ionic liquid monomers within a polyimide backbone. The purpose of the ionic liquid monomers was to enhance the solubility of acid gases (such as CO2) to produce reverse selective membranes to recover sequestration ready carbon dioxide. Random copolymers consisting of an aromatic dianhydride and diamine with amino functionalized ionic liquid monomers has been successfully synthesized and characterized. The pure gas transport properties over a range of temperatures were measured along with gas sorption in the ILs monomers for comparison. The glass transition temperature, FTIR spectroscopy, molecular weight and mechanical properties of the polyimide copolymers were also tested. The impact of IL monomer concentration and structure on the thermal-mechanical and gas transport properties of the copolymers will be presented.

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