SEPARATION AND PURIFICATION OF BIOFUELS AND SOLVENTS VIA PERVAPORATION PROCESS

Abstract

It is inevitable that bioalcohols will serve as important renewable and sustainable energy resources in the future. Therefore, there is an urging need for scientists and researchers to develop an efficient separation process which occupies the major portion of the overall production cost of fuel grade bioalcohols. Membrane-based pervaporation process has been reported as an energy efficient candidate in this application. This research focused on developing high performance pervaporation membranes for the separation and purification of biofuels and solvents based on the aspects of material development, membrane formation and hollow fiber spinning. The material development was conducted by synthesizing polybenzoxazole membrane through the thermal rearrangement (TR) process. On the other hand, the fundamentals in membrane formation were investigated by using semi-crystalline poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) as the membrane material. The knowledge from the aforementioned studies was subsequently applied to fabricate high performance dual layer hollow fiber for dehydration of bioethanol through the proposed immiscible induced phase separation (I2PS) process.