Carbon Molecular Sieve Membrane Preparation by Economical Coating and Pyrolysis of Porous Polymer Hollow Fibers

Dip coating and pyrolysis processes are used to create multi-layer asymmetric carbon molecular sieve (CMS) hollow fiber membranes with excellent gas separation properties. Coating of an economical engineered support with a high-performance polyimide to create precursor fibers with a dense skin layer reduces material cost by 25-fold compared to monolithic precursors or ceramic supports. CMS permeation results with CO2/CH4 (50:50) mixed gas feed show attractive CO2/CH4 selectivity of 58.8 and CO2 permeance of 310 GPU at 35 degrees C.