New approaches in the design of ceramic and hybrid membranes

This paper describes approaches developed for the preparation and also the characterization of innovative inorganic or hybrid membrane materials. Soft chemistry routes, sol-gel methods and plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) are used to get tailor-made layers with different architectures. The infiltrated composite membranes are first examined. They exhibit a good thermo-mechanical resistance, a low sensitivity to the presence of defects, a relatively high flow resistance and are attractive for catalytic contactor applications. Preliminary results on supported ceramic membranes with a hierarchical porosity are then presented. Finally, examples are given to illustrate the interest of the PECVD route and of plasma post-treatments for preparing very thin hybrid separative layers. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.