Membrane technology

In a world that is trying to reduce its carbon footprint, where major chemical companies have pledged to achieve ambitious sustainability goals, the great potential of membrane filtration is unknown to many.

Are your processes aligned with the European sustainable transition targets? Membrane technology represents a robust tool to achieve these targets and with the help of VITO you can make your investments future-proof, hence increasing competitiveness. VITO provides independent science based contract research services, helping you to select the most sustainable and economically viable separation process to reach your business goals.

What is membrane filtration?

Membrane filtration is a mild, non-destructive and energy-efficient separation technique that represents a sustainable alternative to conventional separation processes, such as distillation and evaporation, and is complementary to crystallisation.

A membrane is a semi-permeable barrier between two liquid phases. When a driving force (pressure, concentration, temperature) is applied, the components of the feed stream are retained or permeated depending on their interaction with the membrane.

Energy-efficiency is embedded in the DNA of all the membrane processes: e.g. pervaporation which is comparable to distillation but much more energy-friendly, combines permeation and vaporisation.

The separation efficiency of a membrane process is defined by the flux through the membrane and the selectivity or capability of the membrane to retain or let through specific components.

Carefully selected process conditions and cleaning protocols allow to address fouling issues, ensuring a long lifetime of the membrane, reducing the cost of use, adding to your ease of mind.

Membranes allow for several unit operations. The most common ones are concentration, purification and solvent exchange.

The qualifying features of any membrane process are:

Isothermal: there is no change in temperature, resulting in energy saving and allowing for separation of labile compounds
No additives: nothing is added, the feed is separated as it is. This makes membrane separation particularly suited for highly regulated products
Scalability: scale up of membranes is mostly performed by adding modules that intrinsically reduce the risk associated with large scale-up factors

Why use membrane filtration as a separation technology?

Membrane filtration can give you the competitive advantage by significantly reducing energy consumption. It has potential for material savings and offers opportunities for your side and waste streams. Membrane filtration has a reduced footprint and process complexity, thereby minimising costs and impact on environment.

Non-thermal, molecular scale separation
Suitable for many unit operations, from concentration and purification of valuable compounds to solvent recovery
Inherently energy-efficient, mild and scalable, offering a real sustainable alternative to classical separation technologies
Enormous potential for intensification/debottlenecking of solvent-intensive processes regarding energy requirements, CO₂ footprint, resource circularity, product quality/yield, productivity
Extensive opportunities for both process and product innovation/improvement
Widely applied and applicable across process industries, from pharma to oil and gas
Readily available technology for separation toolbox of process chemists and engineers
Number of industrial realisations increasing steadily, driven by established/emerging market players and a small but active research community

Membrane technology for your business

Would you like to use membrane technology to improve your processes and business? Are you looking for food-grade, GMP compliant and/or ATEX-rated pilot plant infrastructure to reduce the risk towards upscaling of your membrane technology innovation? We'd be happy to help you.

Which applications are suited for membrane filtration?

Reaction

Manage equilibrium reactions, increase catalyst TON, improve carbon economy, increase overall sustainability. These are just some of the challenges process chemists have to meet every day. With raised awareness for sustainability in chemical companies, these are challenges that require a specialised approach. In fact, membrane separation may offer new options, as has already been demonstrated in:

High dilution synthesis
Ring closing metathesis
Oligonucleotides synthesis
Enzymatic reactions
Peptide synthesis
Hydrosilylation of alkenes
Alkyne hydration
Suzuki coupling
Mitsunobu reaction

Projectupdate

Organic Solvent nanofiltration (OSN) or Solvent Resistance Nanofiltration (SRNF) offers the process chemist an a-thermal separation tool, alternative to energy-intensive distillation, evaporation or other classical separation methods.

Projectupdate

Chiral amines are key building blocks for many new pharmaceuticals (APIs). The bulk of medicines currently produced are made of chiral compounds.

Projectupdate

Organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) is an emerging technology since it offers an economically interesting alternative separation process that has the added advantage of often leading to a more sustainable process.

Projectupdate

Continuing to produce top quality pharmaceutical drugs and fine chemicals while limiting costs and energy consumption is a challenge that VITO is addressing, alongside the pharmaceutical and fine chemicals industries.

Purification and product recovery

Membrane separation is new in the process development engineer toolbox. When you are considering evaporating a solvent, distilling a mixture, crystallising your product, you may want to look at membrane separation.

Isothermal concentrations, impurities removal, second crop from mother liquors, solvent switch, telescoping, counterion swap, homo catalyst recovery, API recovery are just some of the typical applications of membranes.

Projectupdate

Organic solvent nanofiltration (OSN) is an emerging technology since it offers an economically interesting alternative separation process that has the added advantage of often leading to a more sustainable process.

Projectupdate

The growing acceptance of membrane technology in industry and the availability of more and better membranes in recent years have increased interest in using membranes also in organic solvent streams.

Nieuwsbericht

As part of the MACBETH project, VITO helped to develop an advanced process for enriching the omega 3 and 6 fatty acids in fish oil. Collaborating with industry leaders, this MACBETH project case on biocatalytic oil cleavage successfully integrated a biocatalytic enzyme reactor with VITO’s custom membrane unit.

Solvent recovery

Most chemical processes require a solvent. Which is a double cost: when purchasing and when discharging. That’s why nowadays an increasing number of companies are equipped with a solvent recovery section. Solvent recovery is mostly performed by distillation that requires heat, which is becoming more and more difficult to source as well as expensive. Sometimes, membrane separation allows for a balance between economics and sustainability aspects, by enabling clean separations that are isothermal or can be operated with residual heat.

Projectupdate

Cyclisation, polymerisation and enzymatic reactions often show substrate inhibition or precipitation of the substrate or of the reactant. The typical high substrate concentrations in this type of reactions favour intermolecular reactions and lead to polymerisation of the substrate in the reaction medium or to the occurrence of other unwanted side-reactions, thereby seriously decreasing the yield to the desired product and the product purity.

Nieuwsbericht

SolTex aimed to develop a circular resource optimisation in the frame of a Danish, mixed textiles fibre-to-fibre recycling project. The SolTex project focused particularly on solvent recovery and re-use.

Side stream treatment

Environmental chemists and engineers typically have to deal with low budgets, large flow rates and a few components that can be non-biodegradable, environmentally hazardous etc. High flow rate, particularly when water is the main component, rules out distillation and evaporation for economical reasons.

This is where membrane operation can play a role. Thanks to the broad availability of water treatment membranes and the easy scalability you can address a wide variety of environmental challenges that could not be solved before.

Nieuwsbericht

"As a science based AgTech company that heavily relies on chemical processes, we got to know VITO a few years ago. We were given a presentation on how membranes can be used in separation processes. A technology we weren’t familiar with, but we immediately saw the opportunities that membrane technology would be able to give us in a number of projects."

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Frequently asked questions

Membrane filtration is a mild, non-destructive and energy-efficient separation technique that represents a sustainable alternative to conventional separation processes, such as distillation and evaporation, and is complementary to crystallisation.

Membrane filtration can give you the competitive advantage by significantly reducing energy consumption. It has potential for material savings and offers opportunities for your side and waste streams. Membrane filtration has a reduced footprint and process complexity, thereby minimising costs and impact on environment.