Modelling nitrate reduction in a flow-through catalytic membrane contactor: Role of pore confining effects on water viscosity

Short Review on Porous Metal Membranes-Fabrication, Commercial Products, and Applications

Porous metal membranes have recently received increasing attention, and significant progress has been made in their preparation and characterisation. This progress has stimulated research in their applications in a number of key industries including wastewater treatment, dairy processing, wineries, and biofuel purification. This review examines recent significant progress in porous metal membranes including novel fabrication concepts and applications that have been reported in open literature or obtained in our laboratories. The advantages and disadvantages of the different membrane fabrication methods were presented in light of improving the properties of current membrane materials for targeted applications. Sintering of particles is one of the main approaches that has been used for the fabrication of commercial porous metal membranes, and it has great advantages for the fabrication of hollow fibre metal membranes. However, sintering processes usually result in large pores (e.g., >1 µm). So far, porous metal membranes have been mainly used for the filtration of liquids to remove the solid particles. For porous metal membranes to be more widely used across a number of separation applications, particularly for water applications, further work needs to focus on the development of smaller pore (e.g., sub-micron) metal membranes and the significant reduction of capital and maintenance costs.

Nano-engineered hierarchical porous silicas for enhanced catalytic efficiency in the liquid phase

By tailoring the pore properties (size, morphology and orientation) of hierarchical catalysts, we show experimentally the importance of active phase accessibility on catalytic efficiency.

Development of Flow-Through Polymeric Membrane Reactor for Liquid Phase Reactions: Experimental Investigation and Mathematical Modeling

Incorporating metal nanoparticles into polymer membranes can endow the membranes with additional functions. This work explores the development of catalytic polymer membrane through synthesis of palladium nanoparticles based on the approaches of intermatrix synthesis (IMS) inside surface functionalized polyethersulfone (PES) membrane and its application to liquid phase reactions. Flat sheet PES membranes have been successfully modified via UV-induced graft polymerization of acrylic acid monomer. Palladium nanoparticles have been synthesized by chemical reduction of palladium precursor loaded on surface modified membranes, an approach to the design of membranes modified with nanomaterials. The catalytic performances of the nanoparticle incorporated membranes have been evaluated by the liquid phase reduction of p-nitrophenol using NaBH4 as a reductant in flow-through membrane reactor configuration. The nanocomposite membranes containing palladium nanoparticles were catalytically efficient in achieving a nearly 100% conversion and the conversion was found to be dependent on the flux, amount of catalyst, and initial concentration of nitrophenol. The proposed mathematical model equation represents satisfactorily the reaction and transport phenomena in flow-through catalytic membrane reactor.