Abstract
Thanks to their well-defined molecular sieving and stability, zeolites have been proposed in selective membrane separations, such as gas separation and pervaporation. For instance, the incorporation of zeolites into polymer phases to generate composite (or mixed matrix) membranes revealed important advances in pervaporation. Therefore, the goal of this review is to compile and elucidate the latest advances (over the last 2–3 years) of zeolite applications in pervaporation membranes either combining zeolites or polymers. Here, particular emphasis has been focused on relevant insights and findings in using zeolites in pervaporative azeotropic separations and specific aided applications, together with novel concepts of membranes. A brief background of the pervaporation process is also given. According to the findings of this review, we provide future perspectives and recommendations for new researchers in the field.
Highlights
PV has been successfully applied in the separation of plenty of binary water-organic [4,5,6], organic-water [7,8,9], and organic-organic [10,11,12] azeotropic mixtures, among others
The water transport in zeolites is directly dependent on the Si/Al ratio, since such a relationship influences the final adsorption of the hydrophilic sites of zeolites [27]
Apart from J and β, the performance of a PV process can be expressed in terms of the pervaporation separation index (PSI), which determines the overall performance of a PV operation [31]
Summary
Several inorganic materials have been proposed for the role of selective separation in PV technology, including metal-organic frameworks, graphene-based materials, silicas, covalent-organic frameworks, and zeolites [13,14,15,16]. ZSM-5 belongs to the medium pore zeolites with pore apertures in the range 0.51–0.56 nm [21]
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