Preparation of Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework-8 (ZIF-8) Membrane on Porous Polymeric Support via Contra-Diffusion Method

Abstract

In the last decade, many attempts were made to put metal organic frameworks (MOFs) in industrial applications, but most of these efforts weren’t successfully. As one of the few MOFs produced on industrial scale, ZIF-8 has interesting pore size, huge internal surface area and great thermal and chemical stability. Therefore, ZIF-8 might become the first MOF, which will be applied in industrial separation processes. In this thesis, a synthesis study is presented, which leads to a cheap and convenient way to fabricate defect-free and thin ZIF-8 membranes on porous polymeric supports showing high selectivity and high gas permeance. The ZIF-8 layers were produced via a contra-diffusion method. Several polymeric membranes were employed as support in this study, such as PAN, PEI, PSU, PA and PTSC. We studied the influence of the polymeric support properties for the ZIF-8 membrane preparation and optimized the ZIF-8 preparation conditions. The ZIF-8 membranes were characterized via scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). For gas permeation test, we chose a Wicke-Kallenbach apparatus to measure membrane’s gas permeance and selectivity. One of the best ZIF-8 membranes exhibited a hydrogen permeance of 3.45 × 10-8 mol m-2 s-1 Pa-1 and an ideal selectivity of hydrogen over propane of about 500.