Abstract
Polysulfone (PSF) is one of the most popular commercial ultrafiltration membranes recently used in the field of high-performance gas separation. PSF membranes are distinguished by their sponge-like pore (SP) or finger-like pore (FP) structures. Also, they are usually reinforced with a porous backing layer, such as non-woven polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fabric, to improve their tensile strength. This research aims to study the effect of these different porous structures (SP and FP) and PET support layer on the gas permeation and selectivity characteristics of PSF membranes. The PSF/PET composite membranes were fabricated using a phase-inversion approach with different thicknesses of 100 µm and 200 µm to obtain SP and FP structures, respectively. The basic properties of the fabricated membranes, including morphology, coherence layers, pore structures, surface roughness, mechanical, chemical, and thermal were examined. Meanwhile, the pure gas measurements of H2, CH4, CO2, and N2 were taken using a laboratory setup at different pressures and temperatures up to 5 bar and 60 °C respectively. The scanning electron microscope results showed that the PSF solution had successfully penetrated between PET fibres closing their voids and formulated different thin and dense layers on their surfaces with SP and FP structures. Meanwhile, the PSF(FP)/PET membrane manifested bigger pore size (63 nm), lager porosity, higher strength, and higher thermal stability compared to PSF(SP)/PET membrane with estimated percentage of 24, 28, 23, 16 %, respectively. The gas measurements showed that the SP structure can provide higher gases permeability, as opposed to FP structure that showed better selectivity in the trend H2/CO2 (3.21) > H2/N2 (3.05) > H2/CH4 (1.99) with 36–80% improvement, when compared to PSF(SP)/PET membranes. Based on that, it is highly recommended to use PSF/PET with FP structure in hydrogen separation industry.
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