A pycnometric method to estimate the porosity of hydrophobic hollow fiber membranes

Abstract

The porosity of hollow fiber membranes is an important property in the design of processes implementing membrane contactors as it is directly related to the effective surface available for mass transfer. Nevertheless, measuring the porosity requires most of the time complex experimental setup and some of the existing methods are questionable when applied to polymeric membrane materials. In this work, we adapted a method originally proposed to estimate the porosity of flat membranes, in order to estimate the porosity of hollow fiber membranes.•Some hydrophobic hollow fibers are put in contact with a non-wetting solvent inside a pycnometer. The mass of the system is measured.•The process is repeated using a wetting solvent.•The porosity is deduced from the difference between the weighing data.