Engineering Performance of Carbon Molecular Sieve Membranes for Natural Gas Separation

Carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membranes are formed from high temperature pyrolysis of polymeric membranes. Studies have shown that CMS membranes have an attractive performance for challenging gas separation, far exceeding that of polymeric membranes in many cases. Although the formation processes for CMS membranes are quite complex, we have shown evidence that CMS performance can be controlled by engineering the pyrolysis environment using a set of processing variables for a 6FDA-based polymer precursor. Furthermore, our recent investigation has revealed that application of the approach to a different polymer precursor is also relevant for tuning final carbon properties. A hypothesis, supported by analysis of the pyrolysis process will be considered to help explain the attractive results.