Development of Ionic Liquid-based Polymer Membranes with High Permeability and High CO2 Selectivity
There have been continuous research activities towards the designing of various separation technologies for the sequestration of CO2. Organic polymer membranes pay a great attention for its eco-friendliness, simple operation and energy-saving. Polymer membranes such as polyimides, polyethers, TRs and PIMs are well known for their high permeability and excellent mechanical, chemical, and thermal properties. However, the foremost challenge for these polymeric membrane materials is their enhanced selectivity to CO2 without sacrificing permeability. The selectivity problems would be overcome by ionic liquids (ILs), which lead to a considerable attention on RTILs-based sequestrations for CO2/N2 and CO2/CH4 separations. The current research trends based on RTIL polymer membranes, together with our original concept of applying RTIL to various polymeric structures will be presented.