Fabrication and Evaluation of Functionalized Nano-titanium Dioxide (F-NanoTiO2)/ polysulfone (PSf) Nanocomposite Membranes for Gas Separation

Tio2 nanoparticles were pretreated with ethelendiamine (eda) to synthesize aminefunctionalized tio2. the mixed matrix membranes (mmm) comprised of aminfunctionalized tio2 inside polysulfone (psf) matrix were fabricated and characterizedfor gas separation. the effects of the amin-functionalized tio2 loading on the gaspermeation properties of the mmm were investigated by varying the aminfunctionalized tio2 loading in the psf matrix from 0–10 wt%. the fabricated aminfunctionalized tio2/psf mmm were characterized by scanning electron microscopy(sem), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ft/ir) and pure gas permeation test.gas permeation measurement showed that mmms embedded with different amount ofamin-functionalized tio2 exhibited different separation performances. for example, inmmms containing 10 wt% amin-functionalized tio2, the permeability of n2, ch4, co2and o2 increased up to 0.69, 0.8, 3.5 and 1.1 gpu respectively. due to the higherinteraction of amine groups on f-nano tio2 with polar gases, amin-functionalized tio2possessed better performances in terms of permeability and selectivity in comparison topure tio2. the results revealed that the functionalization of tio2 has improved the gaspermeability of prepared membranes.