High performance ceramic hollow fiber supported PDMS composite pervaporation membrane for bio-butanol recovery

In this work, ceramic hollow fiber supported polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) composite membranes were developed by dip-coating PDMS layer on the surface of macroporous ceramic hollow fiber support. By controlling the properties of polymer solution and ceramic hollow fiber, high-quality ceramic hollow fiber supported PDMS composite membranes were fabricated for pervaporation (PV) recovery of bio-butanol. It was found both the viscosity of PDMS dip-coating solution and pore size and structure of ceramic support played critical roles in determining the microstructures, the mass transport and the PV performance of PDMS composite membrane. The optimized composite membrane with defect-free PDMS layer and low transport resistance of support showed a total flux of 1282 g/m2 h and separation factor of 42.9 for 1 wt% n-butanol–water mixtures at temperature of 40 °C during 200 h continuous operation. In addition, the membrane PV performance and stability in acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation broth were investigated. The results showed the PDMS composite membrane exhibited high and stable performance for butanol recovery from ABE systems. Compared with literatures, our work demonstrated that the ceramic hollow fiber supported PDMS composite membrane could be a competitive PV membrane for recovering organic compounds from fermentation broth to produce renewable biofuels.