Progress in Filtration and Separation

6. Organophilic Pervaporation

A newly emerging application area is organophilic pervaporation for the separation of aromatic/aliphatic, aromatic/alicyclic and isomeric mixtures. Applications until now are still scarce, which is mainly due to the limited availability of organophilic pervaporation membranes. The separation layer has to be tuned for almost each distinct application (Claes, 2012). Of specific interest are applications in separating olefins from paraffins such as propene/propane, aliphatic hydrocarbons containing benzene or toluene, and xylene isomers. The easiest separations, which are already operational, use hydrophilic membranes for separating ethanol or methanol from mixtures containing hydrocarbons, ethers and esters. An overview ...