Gas separation performance of 6FDA-based polyimides with different chemical structures

This work reports the gas separation performance of several 6FDA-based polyimides with different chemical structures, to correlate chemical structure with gas transport properties with a special focus on CO₂ and CH₄ transport and plasticization stability of the polyimides membranes relevant to natural gas purification. The consideration of the other gases (He, O₂ and N₂) provided additional insights regarding effects of backbone structure on detailed penetrant properties. The polyimides studied include 6FDA-DAM, 6FDA-mPDA, 6FDA-DABA, 6FDA-DAM:DABA (3:2), 6FDA-DAM:mPDA (3:2) and 6FDA-mPDA:DABA (3:2). Both pure and binary gas permeation were investigated. The packing density, which is tunable by adjusting monomer type and composition of the various samples, correlated with transport permeability and selectivity. The separation performance of the polyimides for various gas pairs were also plotted for comparison to the upper bound curves, and it was found that this family of materials shows attractive performance. The CO₂ plasticization responses for the un-cross-linked polyimides showed good plasticization resistance to CO₂/CH₄ mixed gas with 10% CO₂; however, only the cross-linked polyimides showed good plasticization resistance under aggressive gas feed conditions (CO₂/CH₄ mixed gas with 50% CO₂ or pure CO₂). For future work, asymmetric hollow fibers and carbon molecular sieve membranes based on the most attractive members of the family will be considered.