Abstract
Both Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) and membrane permeation are two widely known stand-alone technologies, which have been extensively developed and applied in industry for gas separation. Their process configurations have been widely studied to either minimize recompression work for reducing final operational costs, or to give a better reuse to some waste gases that are not usually recovered by conventional methods. Although there is some published work on the development of hybrid systems integrating these two technologies, the awareness for innovative hybrid permeation- and sorption-based processes only recently was seen as an opportunity for the 4R's practice: Reduce the amount and toxicity of waste, Recover its energy, Reuse containers and products, and Recycle as much as possible, which includes buying products with recycled content. In applications where membranes provide a moderately pure product at low cost, the separation may be inexpensively upgraded by a subsequent process. Likewise, the separation performance of fully established non-permeating technologies can be improved with marginal costs by using truly synergistically hybrid schemes involving membranes. This fact has motivated active research on the integration of membranes with other separation processes. Accordingly, newly advances in membrane-based hybrid processes for gas separation and waste reduction via adsorption are examined, and the future prospects for synergistic coupling of separation processes are also suggested. The areas of potential waste reduction focused are natural gas, landfill gas, synthesis gas, hydrogen from reformer off-gas and olefin paraffin separation.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Advances in Solid Hybrid Materials and Membranes |
Editors | WU C XU T |
Place of Publication | India |
Publisher | Transworld Research Network |
Pages | 219-246 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-81-7895-461-5 |
Publication status | Published - 2010 |