Acidic Gases Separation from Gas Mixtures on the Supported Ionic Liquid Membranes Providing the Facilitated and Solution-Diffusion Transport Mechanisms

Abstract

Nowadays, the imidazolium-based ionic liquids containing acetate counter-ions are attracting much attention as both highly selective absorbents of the acidic gases and CO2 carriers in the supported ionic liquid membranes. In this regard, the investigation of the gas transport properties of such membranes may be appropriate for better understanding of various factors affecting the separation performance and the selection of the optimal operating conditions. In this work, we have tested CH4, CO2 and H2S permeability across the supported ionic liquid membranes impregnated by 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (bmim[OAc]) with the following determination of the ideal selectivity in order to compare the facilitated transport membrane performance with the supported ionic liquid membrane (SILM) that provides solution-diffusion mechanism, namely, containing 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (bmim[BF4]). Both SILMs have showed modest individual gases permeability and ideal selectivity of CO2/CH4 and H2S/CH4 separation that achieves values up to 15 and 32, respectively. The effect of the feed gas mixture composition on the permeability of acidic gases and permeselectivity of the gas pair was investigated. It turned out that the permeation behavior for the bmim[OAc]-based SILM toward the binary CO2/CH4, H2S/CH4 and ternary CO2/H2S/CH4 mixtures was featured with high acidic gases selectivity due to the relatively low methane penetration through the liquid phase saturated by acidic gases.

Keywords

• gas mixtures
• supported ionic liquid membrane
• hydrogen sulfide
• carbon dioxide
• natural gas treating