New Sherwood correlations for hollow fiber membrane contactor modules: Comparison of porous and nonporous asymmetric membranes

초록

A critical drawback of the membrane contactor (MC) process is the detrimental pore-wetting phenomenon, necessitating the use of hydrophobic membranes. A straightforward solution could be to implement nonporous asymmetric membranes; however, the exact implications of this strategy have not yet been quantified. In this work, we compared porous polypropylene (PP) and nonporous polymethylpentene (PMP) asymmetric membranes for the CO2 degassing MC process. Although the porous PP membrane displayed 7-fold higher CO2 permeance than PMP, their actual CO2 degassing performance was similar in the MC process. The membrane resistance for porous PP and nonporous PMP was calculated to comprise 3–20 % and 10–30 % of the total mass transfer resistance, respectively. Upon wetting, however, the membrane resistance for porous PP exacerbates up to 95 %. Therefore, we assert in this work that employing nonporous membranes offers better long-term reliability without performance loss, especially for solutions containing organic compounds. Moreover, we found that PP and PMP membrane performance can be clearly distinguished on the Sh vs Reb plane; hence, we proposed new Sherwood correlation models specific for nonporous asymmetric membrane modules, displaying better precision than conventional Sherwood models. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.

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