Permeation behavior of olefin/nitrogen/hydrogen through PDMS dense and composite membranes

The worldwide annual production of polyolefins amounted to 60 million tons in 2000. During the process, 1-2 wt% of the olefin monomers have been emitted and flared into the air, causing the huge energy consumption and severe carbon dioxide emission. Recently, membrane process has been proved to be the most competitive among other separation processes in terms of cost of equipments, energy consumption and safety in this application. The performance of membrane process highly depends on the membrane properties and thus, it is very important to develop good membrane materials and composite membranes. We prepared PMDS dense and composite membranes and studied basic permeation behaviors of a series of olefins(ethylene, propylene, 1 -butylene), nitrogen and hydrogen as model gases.