Novel Ceramic-Organic Vapor Permeation Membranes for VOC Removal

Vapor permeation with highly permeable and organic-selective membranes is becoming an increasingly popular technique for preventing VOC emissions that are generated by a variety of stationary sources, including solvent and surface coating operations, gasoline storage operations, and printing operations. A limitation of current vapor permeation (VP) processes is the upper temperature limit for polymeric VP membranes, about 100-125pC. In most cases, this results in the need to employ cooling for compressed air feed and may also result in greater membrane areas than would be required for higher temperature operation. Wider application of the technology would be possible if inexpensive VP modules operable at appreciably higher temperatures were available.