Asymmetric Carbon Molecular Sieve (CMS) Hollow Fiber Membranes

Carbon Molecular Sieve (CMS) membranes has a potential to achieve attractive gas separation properties. CMS membranes in dense film configuration have shown promising results. Hence, for industrial application it’s important to translate this high performance in hollow fiber configuration. A shortcoming in CMS hollow fiber fabrication has been the collapse of porous support resulting in lower gas separation productivities.

The goal of this study is to prevent the collapse in CMS hollow fibers by a process called as V-Treatment. Our V-Treatment process uses the sol-gel reaction mechanism between organic-alkoxy silane (i.e. Vinyltrimethoxy Silane – VTMS) and moisture. The enhanced CMS hollow fiber morphology after V-treatment shows an increase in flux for all gas-pairs maintaining the attractive selectivities. In our talk, we will present the results for CMS V-Treated hollow fibers from two polyimide precursors i.e. Matrimid^® and 6FDA: BPDA-DAM fabricated under different pyrolysis conditions. The performance is evaluated for both pure and mixed gas feed.