Evaluation of Sorption of Propylene and Propane in Membrane of Polyurethane

Containing Silver Nanoparticles

Carolina Guedes Fioravante Rezende(1); Cristiano Piacsek Borges(2), Alberto Claudio

Habert(2)

(1) Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Department of Chemical

Engineering (DEQ); (2) Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Chemical
Engineering Program (PEQ)

The facilitated transport membranes have been studied as a more economical

alternative to propylene/propane separation process than cryogenic distillation
process. The challenge in this area is the plasticizing caused by strong interaction
between propylene and silver nanoparticles that act as facilitating transport agent. As a
consequence of plasticization, a drastic decrease in the diffusion selectivity occurs in
permeation tests of multicomponent mixtures. To evaluate the plasticization effect, the
pure gas sorption study has been presented as the first insight study of the transport
behavior of these gases in different operational conditions. In this work, the sorption of
propane and propylene was evaluated by single pressure decay apparatus. In this
method, the amount of gas sorbed by membrane material at a given pressure and
temperature is determines by the difference between initial (feed pressure) and the
final pressure (equilibrium pressure). The sorption test was performed for propane and
propylene in polyurethane (PU) and polyurethane containing silver nanoparticles
membranes (PUAg), at several temperatures and pressure. Comparing the solubility of
propylene and propane, the sorption isotherms showed that the amount of propylene
sorbed by PUAg is so high that correspond to 10% of the membrane mass at 30 oC and 7
bar, whereas the amount of propane in PUAg, at the same conditions, correspond to
1,5% of the PUAg mass. Compared to PU membrane, the preferential interaction
between propylene and silver nanoparticles in PUAg causes an increase in sorption
selectivity of PUAg membrane as seen in Figure 1. The Figure 1(A) also shows that
decrease in temperature or the increase in system pressure lead to an increase in
sorption selectivity. These effects in temperature and pressure increase the propylene
condensability which favors the interaction between propylene and silver nanoparticles
and set up the plasticizing. The results of this work showed the effect of nanoparticles
on thermodynamics step of propylene/propane separation. This pointed to safer
perspectives with regard to the application of facilitated transport membranes in the
propylene/propane separation.
Figure 1: Sorption selectivity for PUAg (A) and PU(B) at different temperature and pressure.