Abstract
In the last few decades, membrane technology has been a great attention for gas separation technology especially for natural gas sweetening. The intrinsic character of membranes makes them fit for process escalation, and this versatility could be the significant factor to induce membrane technology in most gas separation areas. Membranes were synthesized with various materials which depended on the applications. The fabrication of polymeric membrane was one of the fastest growing fields of membrane technology. However, polymeric membranes could not meet the separation performances required especially in high operating pressure due to deficiencies problem. The chemistry and structure of support materials like inorganic membranes were also one of the focus areas when inorganic membranes showed some positive results towards gas separation. However, the materials are somewhat lacking to meet the separation performance requirement. Mixed matrix membrane (MMM) which is comprising polymeric and inorganic membranes presents an interesting approach for enhancing the separation performance. Nevertheless, MMM is yet to be commercialized as the material combinations are still in the research stage. This paper highlights the potential promising areas of research in gas separation by taking into account the material selections and the addition of a third component for conventional MMM.
Highlights
Natural gas can be considered as the largest fuel source required a er the oil and coal [1]
The consumption of natural gas is limited to the industry, but natural gas is extensively consumed by the power generation and transportation sector [2]. ese phenomena supported the idea of going towards sustainability and green technology as the natural gas is claimed to generate less-toxic gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOxx) upon combustion as shown in Table 1 [3]
With the advantages of lower capital cost, easy operation process, and high CO2 removal percentage, membrane technology offers the best treatment for natural gas [6]
Summary
Natural gas can be considered as the largest fuel source required a er the oil and coal [1]. Pure natural gas from the wellhead cannot directly be used as it contains undesirable impurities such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen sulphide (H2S) [4]. All of these unwanted substances must be removed as these toxic gases could corrode the pipeline since CO2 is highly acidic in the presence of water. Natural gas treatment was predominated with some methods such as absorption, adsorption, and cryogenic distillation These methods require high treatment cost due to regeneration process, large equipments, and broad area for the big equipments [6]. We required high permeability and high selectivity of membrane, but, most membranes exhibit high selectivity in low permeability and vice versa which make this is as a major tradeoff of membranes, and none of these technologies are yet to treat natural gas containing high CO2 (>80 mol%) [9]
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