Ceramic Nanofiltration for Organic Solvents

The progress in the area of so-called solvent resistant NF or organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) has accelerated since 2000, mainly driven by European research, due to its enormous potential in a wide range of industrial applications. Possible applications vary from bulk production processes such as (bio) refineries where high-volume streams need to be separated with low energy use, to low-volume pharmaceutical and fine-chemical processes where better and greener separations of high-value products are required. This chapter provides an overview of past and new achievements in this exciting R&D field. It starts with an overview of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) for ceramic membranes in OSN. The fluxes of all mixtures showed activated temperature behavior as for pure ethanol. For all retentions, the typical Spiegler-Kedem pressure dependence was found. However, no temperature dependence was observed for the alkanes, while the alcohol retentions decreased slightly with temperature.