Dehydration of tetrahydrofuran by pervaporation using a composite membrane |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Chemistry, KLE Technological University, Hubballi 580031, India;2. School of Mechanical Engineering, KLE Technological University, Hubballi 580031, India;3. Department of Chemistry, Karnatak University, Dharwad 580001, India;4. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, KLE Technological University, Hubballi 580031, India |
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Abstract: | Tetrahydrofuran (THF) is a strong aprotic solvent, commonly used in the pharmaceuticals industry due to its broad solvency for both polar and non-polar compounds. THF and water form a homogeneous azeotrope at 5.3 wt.% water thus simple distillation is not feasible to dehydrate THF below this concentration. Pervaporation offers a solution since it is not governed by vapour–liquid equilibria. However many polymer-based pervaporation membranes are cast utilizing THF as the casting solvent and so these membranes have a tendency to swell excessively in its presence. This results in poor separation performance and poor long-term stability and thus renders these membranes unsuitable for THF dehydration.In this study, a new membrane available from CM Celfa, CMC-VP-31 has been tested for the dehydration of THF. The membrane shows excellent performance when dehydrating THF with a flux of over 4 kg m−2 h−1 when dehydrating THF containing 10 wt.% water at 55 °C dropping to 0.12 kg m−2 h−1 at a water content of 0.3 wt.%. The permeances of water and THF in the membrane were calculated to be 11.76 × 10−6 and 7.36 × 10−8 mol m−2 s−1 Pa−1, respectively, at 25 °C and found to decrease in the membrane with increasing temperature to values of 6.71 × 10−6 and 1.63 × 10−8 mol m−2 s−1 Pa−1 at 55 °C. The flux and separation factor were both found to increase with an increase in temperature thus favouring the operation of CMC-VP-31 at high temperatures to optimize separation performance. |
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