Inorganic porous hollow fibers for intensified fractionation and filtration

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Inorganic porous hollow fibers (iPHF) offer superior thermal, chemical, and mechanical stability compared to their organic counterpart. The unprecedented properties of iPHFs combined with facile and inexpensive fabrication makes their application landscape extremely broad. Within the transnational STW/DFG project we have successfully developed highly permeable and mechanically robust silicon carbide hollow fiber membranes. These novel membranes are electrically conductive and enable their use as heatable hollow fibers. Within the project we studied the fundamental effects of a heated fiber on the flow profile during permeation and applied the fibers to two base case applications, namely creating membranes with tunable permeation and selectivity and using the fibers for an effective fouling reduction in filtration processes.Apart from silicon carbide fibers, we are in the process of developing and optimizing other iPHF for distinctive applications: metal fibers and metal coated ceramic hollow fibers for temperature swing adsorption.The objective of the proposed one year extension of the program (as specified in the initial project proposal) is to apply metal coated hollow fibers for temperature swing adsorption, broaden the permeation range of microgel coated membranes and extend the fundamental investigation of flow patterns of mixed convection at permeable walls. The ongoing research involves an unequivocal combination of Materials Science and Process Technology, and is carried out in a successful and close-working transnational collaboration between two leading groups in these respective fields: Inorganic Membranes (University of Twente) and Chemical Process Engineering group (RWTH Aachen).