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From water to organics in membrane separations

Nature Materials volume 16, pages 276–279 (2017)Cite this article

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Membrane materials provide economical means to achieve various separation processes — and their capabilities for processing organic fluids look set to expand significantly.

The amount of energy used for separating chemicals is staggering: 10–15% of the world's total energy consumption1. In the US, the entire transportation sector uses only 2–3 times as much total energy as is used for chemical separations in industry. This situation is in part because of the ubiquity of chemicals in the modern world. For example, around two litres of crude oil per day and 30 kilograms of ethene and propene per year are processed for each person on the planet. It is not just the scale of these processes, however, that demands energy. These examples, and essentially all bulk chemical separations of organic liquids and gases, rely on energy-intensive distillation separations. More than 80% of the energy associated with chemical separations is used in distillation and similar processes such as evaporation that rely on phase changes.

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Figure 1: A hybrid membrane separation process for organic solvent separations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ryan P. Lively and David S. Sholl are at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0100, USA,

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Correspondence to Ryan P. Lively.

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Lively, R., Sholl, D. From water to organics in membrane separations. Nature Mater 16, 276–279 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4860

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