Porous Solid Supports for Dual-Phase Liquid/Solid Membranes

Dual phase membranes consisting of a liquid phase contained within a solid support show promise in a variety of applications including high-temperature CO2 separations and fuel cells. The solid support phase can simply host the active liquid phase or can participate in the separation by supplying electrons or ions. In many cases, the solid material must be inert to corrosive chemical environments at high temperature, while the pore morphology and material properties need to be optimized to suit the particular application. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed expertise in the synthesis of novel porous materials over the last four decades. These efforts have mainly focused on creating ultra-low-density carbon, metal-oxide, and inorganic materials, but recently we have turned our attention to creating support materials for molten-salt-based CO2 separation membranes. This contribution will highlight our recent developments in this area.

Funding was provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Grant 16-LW-013. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by LLNL under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.