Investigating the Performance of Nano Composite Membrane Pebax/TiO2 Nanoparticle Modified with Amino Silane in the Separation of CO2 /CH4

In the current study, an in-depth examination was conducted to evaluate how the particle size of titanium dioxide (TiO2) will affect the mechanical, thermal, and morphological properties of the modified Pebax/TiO2 nanoparticle membrane. TiO2 nanoparticles were initially modified with amino silane and then incorporated into the nanocomposite Pebax/TiO2 membrane. The obtained membranes were characterized by FT-IR, SEM, TEM, TGA, and XRD to assess the effect of modification. The result of membrane performance evaluation indicated that the solubility of the gas molecules increased within the polymer matrix when an increase in CO2 permeability was observed. To test the performance of the nanocomposite membrane in the high-pressure separation process, the feed pressure was increased from 2 to 10 bar and the results demonstrated that the CO2/CH4 selectivity boosted from 16.05 to 97.74, respectively. Furthermore, when the surface of TiO2 nanoparticles was modified by amino silane and its concentration increased in the polymer matrix, the CO2 permeability of the nanocomposite membrane increased from 87.12 to 24.71 compared to that of the pure Pebax membrane. Experimental data were correlated with ANN (artificial neural network. The ANN of the model applied in this study includes the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, purelin or a linear transfer function at the output layer, and tansig or a tangent sigmoid transfer function in the hidden layer with 5 neurons.