Preparation and Characterization of Nanoporous Alumina as Ceramic Membrane Materials

Abstract

To meet growing electricity demand and greenhouse gas emission limitation in the future, it is urgency to improve existing power plant more efficientand less CO2 emission. Oxygen combustion instead of air combustion is quite good to raise up the fossil fuels efficiency. And separation oxygen from the air by ionic conductance at high temperatures is promising in large fuel power plants. Ionic separation processes by ceramic dense membrane need a good support porous membranes with good mechanical and permeable property. Present research reports the porous alumina with nanoporous structure was prepared by vacuum filtration and rapid sintering as a kind of porous support layer in the oxygen ceramic separation membrane. The microstructure of nanoporous alumina was analysed, the mechanical properties and gas permeability were tested and compared with some conventional pore-former method made porous ceramics. The uniform nanopores alumina ceramics with both high strength and high permeability achieved by a vacuum filtrate and rapid sintering method is a candidate as the porous support application in fuel cell and gas separation field.