From Novel Material Concept to Scalable Membrane Product for Gas Separation

Dear Colleagues,

Despite the high number of new materials that are annually reported in scientific literature having superior intrinsic separation performance and beating the corresponding upper bounds, practically, the number of materials converted into new commercial products in the membrane gas separation market has been very limited. Unfortunately, most of these materials won’t make it to market, as they cannot be processed into a membrane with a thin separation layer, or they lose their performance once in contact with an actual feed stream. It seems like the drive with most researchers is to obtain the next best data point on the upper bound and no effort is made to make an actual membrane. Nevertheless, the industry is urgently demanding new membrane products with superior performance.

The ones that do make the effort often face the fact that obtaining funding for research in the fabrication of membranes is difficult, as it is not seen as very attractive, which makes it difficult to publish as well. However, we believe that converting it into an actual membrane is just as important as creating the next new material.   

For this reason, we want to encourage researchers to submit manuscripts that demonstrate the transfer from a material concept into an actual membrane with proven gas separation performance, ideally tested at realistic conditions. We hope that this will increase the number of materials that actually make it to market. Besides, it would justify the amount of funding that is used for the development of new membrane materials.

There is no preferred membrane configuration. It can be, but not limited to, an integrally skinned asymmetric polymeric membrane made by the process of phase inversion, a composite membrane in which the thin separation layer is applied by dipcoating, grafting, interfacial polymerization, or any other technique. Other concepts could be a mixed matrix membrane with a thin separation layer, containing, e.g., MOFs, ceramic, metallic or carbon molecular sieve membranes, with proven mechanical properties.  

We invite researchers to submit manuscripts with a special emphasis on, but not limited to, the following:

• Advances in the membrane fabrication process and approach to obtain scalability
• Novel approaches for processing materials as membranes for gas separation applications
• Mixed gas permeation behavior at elevated temperatures and/or pressures
• The effect of contaminants on the performance of the developed membrane
• Post-treatment methods to improve the separation performance and/or chemical and thermal stability of the developed membranes
• Applications such as N₂-enrichment, biogas upgrading, natural gas treatment, H₂-recovery or purification, olefin/paraffin separation or CO₂-capture

Dr. Oguz Karvan
Dr. Alberto Tena
Dr. Tymen Visser
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Membranes is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.