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

该小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目旨在确定碳陶瓷膜用于烯烃/石蜡混合物高难度分子分离的可行性。 碳分子筛是具有分布在两到三个相对窄的尺寸范围内的小的选择性孔的多孔材料，其可以为所得膜提供对烯烃/链烷烃类似物分离的高选择性。 该项目将开发一种新的工艺，以制造新的刚性碳陶瓷结构，该结构具有化学和热稳定性，从而能够抵抗吸收碳氢化合物引起的塑化。 该项目预计将导致开发具有足够烯烃渗透性和烯烃/石蜡选择性的碳膜，以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，以及它们在一系列具有化学和热挑战性的气体分离中的应用潜力，这些气体分离是传统聚合物膜所不可能实现的。 考虑到回收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/商业影响将是与新型碳膜在分子分离中的成功商业应用相关的巨大经济潜力。 如果这些固有稳定的新型碳膜被成功开发，则它们可以用作各种大型工业应用中的节能分离方法，包括用于蒸汽裂化器中的单体生产的烯烃/链烷烃分离和从炼油厂中的流化催化裂化器废气中回收烯烃。与包括吸收和蒸馏的其他分离方法相比，使用适当的膜材料，基于膜的分离提供了显著降低能耗的优点。

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.