Adsorption-Based Separation: Current Challenges and Future Opportunities

The majority of legacy separation and purification systems rely on thermally driven phase changes under cryogenic conditions and therefore are inherently energy intensive. In addition, their operation relies on hydrocarbon sources and therefore produces a large amount of greenhouse gases. As we make transition to a clean-energy and clean-electricity future over the next 30 years, we need to reduce the dependency of chemical separations to thermally driven processes. Advanced separation units that make use of membrane or adsorption processes can offer a more efficient alternative to the existing separation systems, largely because many of these systems avoid the need to input thermal energy to achieve phase changes. Unfortunately, there are many issues that must be resolved before new non-thermal separations applications can be developed as we develop negative emission technologies for a sustainable future. In particular, with regards to adsorption, recent advances in materials design and discovery have resulted in development of promising materials for various separation processes. Despite such advances, critical challenges remain for the separations community to confront. The primary key challenges facing adsorptive separation include the lack of fundamental understanding of competitive/cooperative effects that can dramatically influence selectivity, capacity, and throughput in complex mixtures; the lack of a thorough understanding of temporal changes that sorbent materials undergo through many separation cycles; and scale-up. In this talk, I will discuss the gaps, challenges, and future opportunities through adsorptive separation, followed by a brief discussion on our research activities that have been conducted in the past few years towards sustainable processes and net zero emission.