Design of Hollow Fiber Pervaporation Systems for the Dehydration of Organic Solvents

Dehydration of solvents is an important step in many pharmaceutical and specialty chemical manufacturing processes. Pervaporation can be used to remove water from a variety of organic solvents including isopropyl alcohol, tetrahyrofuran, peroxides, ketones, ionic liquids etc. Compact Membrane Systems has developed a suite of materials to address these separations using hollow fiber based composite fluoropolymer membranes with high water flux and water/solvent selectivity as well as excellent chemical resistance. This talk will include an overview of these materials and their capabilities, but will mainly focus on how to design a full scale hollow fiber pervaporation system for dehydration when posed with a specific separation challenge. The talk will discuss the relevant performance characteristics that must be measured for each system, how those translate into practical outcomes for the end user and how to use those measurements to design and build the full system. We will cover several different real-world examples, providing practical design information about how to control temperature, determine process flow rates, decide on membrane configuration, and other design decisions.