Organic membranes and related molecular separation processes: input in Energy and Environment areas

Introduction Achieving separation tasks to characterize new molecules or to produce added value components is often very difficult, either at the lab scale or at the industrial level: it is time consuming, costs lot money and may require sophisticated engineering processes. Generally speaking, separation can involve several types of media, going from solids, liquid-solid or even to liquids or gas mixtures. Obviously the more the constituents are alike the worse is generally the selectivity and the highest the overall cost. Among illustrative samples one can think about racemic resolution and isotope enrichment that would really be the top of the separation art. Achieving efficient and smart separations using membranes has long been restricted to biological systems, such as cellular membranes. Nevertheless, since 1970’s, polymeric membranes and membranes processes came into the game and demonstrated first on the lab bench and then in the industry their interest, their potential and their efficiency for the separation of mixtures at the molecular level [1-2]. Going from the molecular structure of polymers to the main features of membranes processes, this paper highlights the efficiency of organic membranes to separate gas mixtures such as inert gas (H2, N2) and organic molecules (hydrocarbons, VOC’s) showing the membrane input and the striking interest of membrane processes in the field of energy and environmental protection [3].