SBIR Phase I: Carbon-Ceramic Composite Membranes for Olefin-Paraffin Separations

这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目旨在建立碳陶瓷膜用于烯烃/石蜡混合物的高难度分子分离的可行性。碳分子筛是一种多孔材料，具有小的选择性孔，分布在两到三个相对狭窄的尺寸范围内，可以为烯烃/石蜡类似物的分离提供高选择性的膜。该项目将开发一种新的工艺来制造新的刚性碳陶瓷结构，这种结构具有化学和热稳定性，因此可以抵抗由碳氢化合物吸收引起的塑化。该项目预计将导致具有足够的烯烃渗透率和烯烃/石蜡选择性的碳膜的开发，从而产生一种有效的工艺来回收目前在聚烯烃工厂排放气体中燃烧的烯烃。此外，这项研究有望增加对碳陶瓷膜的理解，以及它们在一系列化学和热挑战性气体分离中的潜力，这是传统聚合物膜无法实现的。考虑到回收的烯烃的商业价值，以及美国每年消耗的大量烯烃和聚烯烃，该项目的更广泛/商业影响将是与新碳膜在分子分离中的成功商业应用相关的巨大经济潜力。如果这些具有固有稳定性的新型碳膜被成功开发出来，它们可以作为一种节能的分离方法用于各种大型工业应用，包括在蒸汽裂解装置生产单体时的烯烃/石蜡分离，以及在炼油厂从催化裂化装置的废气中回收烯烃。与吸收和蒸馏等其他分离方法相比，使用合适的膜材料，膜基分离的优点是大大降低了能耗。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to establish the feasibility of carbon-ceramic membranes for the highly difficult molecular separation of olefin/paraffin mixtures. Carbon molecular sieves are porous materials that possess small selective pores distributed in two to three relatively narrow size ranges that can provide the resulting membranes with high selectivity for olefin/paraffin analog separations. This project will develop a novel process to make new rigid carbon-ceramic structures that are chemically and thermally stable, and thereby, resistant to plasticization induced by absorption of hydrocarbons. This project is expected to lead to the development of carbon membranes with sufficient olefin permeance and olefin/paraffin selectivity to yield an efficient process to recover olefins that are currently flared in polyolefin plant vent gases. Moreover, this research is expected to increase the understanding of carbon-ceramic membranes and their potential for use in an array of chemically and thermally challenging gas separations that are not possible with conventional polymeric membranes. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the large economic potential associated with the successful commercial use of the new carbon membranes in molecular separations, considering the commercial value of the recovered olefins, and the large volumes of olefins and polyolefins consumed annually in the United States. If these inherently stable new carbon membranes are successfully developed, they could be used as an energy-efficient separation method in variety of large industrial applications including olefin/paraffin separations for monomer production at steam crackers and recovery of olefins from fluid catalytic cracker off-gases in refineries. With the appropriate membrane materials, membrane-based separations offer the advantage of substantially reduced energy consumption compared to other separation methods including absorption and distillation.