Desarrollo y caracterización de membranas compuestas para la separación selectiva de bioalcoholes por pervaporación

Abstract

This dissertation has been structured in five chapters according to the previously mentioned main objectives of the work. To understand the context and the motivation that has led the completion of this dissertation Chapter 1 begins with a general introduction and overview of the pervaporation technology and biofuels sector trends as well as to familiarize the reader with the basic principles of pervaporation and pervaporation membranes and how they are applied in biorefineries for the ABE fermentation process for butanol production and recovery. Chapter 2 focuses on the development of flat sheet pervaporation membranes with the addition of ILs and fillers by TIPS method and describes their separation performance with ABE aqueous solutions. Then, in order to achieve membranes that allow the construction of more compact modules, Chapter 3 deepens into the making of hollow fiber configuration membranes and their performance in pervaporation of ABE mixtures. Hollow fiber membranes were made by dip coating method added to a commercial hollow fiber support. Besides, the work evaluated the addition of a second dense selective layer for butanol recovery. The addition of a material layer on top of the hollow fiber membrane support was done in order to improve their efficiency, especially since hollow fiber membranes result in better performance and selectivity but still a lot of water flux restrains the productivity. Satisfactory results were obtained for the membranes developed as mentioned in previous chapters, but their performance still had to be tested with real samples. Hence, Chapter 4 studies the performance of the PV membranes in real ABE fermentation mixtures by carbohydrate conversion by C. acetobutylicum. The intention of this chapter was to evaluate the polymeric flat sheet membranes that had been used in Chapter 1 to compare with commercially available ones as benchmark prior to the further development of a model and simulate the performance to prove their scalability. This last Chapter was completed during the research stay in the National Laboratory of Energy and Geology (LNEG), in the Biorefineries Unit in Lisbon, Portugal. At the end of each chapter, the nomenclature and references employed to further understand the chapter are included. The last chapter of this dissertation is Chapter 5, also translated to Spanish, which summarizes the main conclusions of the work conducted and the recommended future works to continue this research line. Finally, a list of the scientific contributions and dissemination of the work by the author of this dissertation are listed in the Appendix.