This invention relates to a method of making a fluid separation material
such as membrane of nanopore structure. An
object of this invention is to provide a method of making a fluid separation
material such as membrane which has wide
permeability and selectivity range and is simple and easy to carry out.
Prof. J. Bellare of Department of Chemical Engineering and his colleagues
from Department of Chemistry have developed
a novel method for making a fluid separation material and came up with a
membrane of nanopore structure comprising
a conducting porous polymer film to obtain a porosity of 0.01 to 50% in the
nanopore sizes of 0.05 to 17
nanometers.
The inventors provided several embodiments of this new method. One
of the methods comprises chemically synthesizing
a free standing conducting polymer membrane of 50 to 10000 microns thickness
and nanoengineering the pore
structure to obtain a porosity of 0.01 to 50% and pores in the nanosizes
of 0.05 to 17 nanometers. Another method comprises
casting a conducting polymer membrane of 0.01 to 100 microns thickness
on a porous substrate of 10 to 70%
porosity with the respective polymer solution and nanoengineering the pore
structure.
The porous substrate may be of inherent conductivity made from conducting
material or of induced conductivity made
from a non-conducting material or ceramics and coated with a conducting
material.
The permeability of the membrane obtained by the method of the invention
has been found to be 25.3 to 0.000005 and
the selectivity has been found to be 100-59000. The method of the invention
is simple and easy to carryout and can be
used for the separation of liquids or gases.
Indian patent application no. 12/MUM/2001 Patent grant no. 197754
Inventors: J Bellare, A Q Contractor, S N Dutta
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