Humid Ethylene/Ethane Separation on Ethylene-Selective Materials
Yutao Gong, Carmen Chen, Ryan P. Lively, Krista S. Walton
Abstract
This work examines the performance of three ethylene-selective materials that have the potential to enable “ethylene capture” from streams that are relatively dilute in ethylene. Although there are many components in such streams, two common competing sorbates are ethylene and water. While studies on binary C2H4/C2H6 separation exist, they neglect to explore the effects of humidity. In this work, both dry and humid C2H4/C2H6 breakthroughs were conducted on the following metal–organic frameworks (MOFs): CuBTC, Ni-MOF-74, and zeolite 13X. All three materials were able to separate ethylene from ethane under 40% relative humidity. Although water molecules were expected to compete with ethylene and ethane for adsorption sites, breakthrough experiments showed that C2H4 and C2H6 can still be separated with high selectivity under low humidity conditions. However, at high humidity conditions, the ethylene capture performance of all the sorbents is diminished or not observable.