Plastic Membrane Will Help Filter Toxic Chemicals

Plastic membranes are essential to gas or water separation projects and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has announced a joint Australia-Korea-USA project that developed a new plastic membrane that allows select small particles to pass while targeted large molecules are left out.

This is of great importance in natural gas processing in which toxic carbon dioxide is separated from methane for the production of natural gas fuel. It is also of great importance in water desalination projects. There are places in the world where a heavy dependence on desalinated water may arise due to lowered water tables and increasing drought, as well as because of burgeoning populations.

Additionally, small-large molecule separation is important in landfill gas recovery projects. Landfills produce gasses like methane that can be captured and processed for energy recovery programs: processed to be used as natural gas energy. Landfill gas recovery projects will be of growing importance in light of the Kyoto carbon credits, which are credits used toward offsetting carbon gas emissions through funding non-carbon emission projects such as forestry and sustainable power generation like gas capturing from landfills.

"The ability of the new plastic to separate small molecules surpasses the limits of any conventional plastics. It can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas," said Dr. Anita Hill of CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering. The material, was initially engineered by Ho Bum Park at Hanyang University, Korea, and then analyzed at CSIRO by Anita Hill and her team.