Jing Wang

 Graduate Research Project                                                                                                            

Polymerized pyrrolidinium-based ionic liquid membranes for carbon dioxide capture 

Immidazolium-based IL is one of the most widely studied category, but previous studies showed the toxicity of immidazoliums is much higher than the pyrrolixinium-based ILs. Therefore, the pyrrolidinium-based ILs will also provide greener applications. Membrane technology is one of the fastest growing separation technologies in recent years. The advantage of the membrane technology may include low energy consumption, easy to scale up, high product purity and environmental friendly impact. By making ionic liquid membranes, it is an effective approach to utilize the properties of ILs and advantages of membranes.

One of the most prevalent ionic liquid membranes is supported ionic liquid membrane (SILM), which holds the effective ingredients of ionic liquids in the pores of the commercial membranes. The special physical structure of the membranes provides selectivity to the particles in the environment. The functional IL membrane materials utilize the native properties and functions of their own to achieve an intelligent selective action.

In this work, we fabricated polymerized IL copolymerized into the PVC backbones to form membranes, followed by the characterizations of the IL membranes to help study the composition and properties of the membranes. The lower viscosity compared with the imidazolium- or pyridinium-based ILs make it a challenge to stabilize the pyrrolidiniums in the membranes, but our work successfully solved this problem. Based on our FTIR and EDS results, the polymerized ionic liquid membranes fabricated in our work had both the IL component and the PVC component.

Although having PVC backbone for support, the fabricated membranes were still not flat and easily to roll up. The nonwoven fabric supports are helpful for the flat sheet membranes process, and provide more convenient approach for experiment operation. Therefore, the nonwoven fabric supports are proposed to be introduced to fabricate strong and easily organized membranes.The membranes fabricated are proposed for gas separation, and this part is still in process.

• University of Missouri - Columbia, Department of Chemical Engineering, 12/2012 - Present
• Presented on 2013 AIChE Annual Meeting in the symposium of "Membranes for Gas Separations".
  

• Advisor: Dr. Sheila Baker