Stephen Conover, Applied Membrane Technology,Inc., 11558 Encore Circle, Minnetonka, MN 55343, Gordana Obuskovic, Otto York Department of Chemical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, 161 Warren St, Newark, NJ 07102, Kamalesh K. Sirkar, Chemical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Membrane Seperations, 161 Warren st, Newark, NJ 07102, and Yingjie Qin, Chembrane Research & Engineering,Inc., NJIT Enterprise Development Center III, 211 Warren St., Newark, NJ 07103.
Hollow Fiber based VOC capture & recovery membrane modules offer several advantages such as compact system designs, lower energy demands, and less concern over handling concentrated explosive vapors. Professor Sirkar's work on VOC separations utilizing hollow fibers has evolved a series of operating modes which can be tailored to suit not only a variety of VOCs but also a range of VOC loadings and feed flow rates associated with different industrial gas streams.
This presentation will trace some of the journey from benchtop studies and modeling in Professor Sirkar's labs at NJIT to the pilot scale skid based systems currently undergoing field demonstration studies under NASA sponsorship. Applied Membrane Technology Inc., has worked with Dr. Sirkar since the 1990's to evolve these concepts incl
uding modules utilizing plasma polymerized composites, with and without immobilized liquids trapped in the pores, as well as, by combining such composites with liquid absorbents for enhanced extraction rates. Economic analyses and recent field study data from a skid based system employing over 600,000 hollow fibers will be presented.