Membranes with Favorable Chemical Materials for Pervaporation Process: A Review Soheila Manshad 1* , Mohd Ghazali Mohd Nawawi 1 , Mohammad Reza Sazegar 2 , Hashim Bin Hassan 1 and Abdulhakim M Alamaria 1 1 Department of Polymer Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Malaysia 2 Department of Chemistry, Tehran North Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran *Corresponding author: Soheila Manshad, Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Department of Polymer Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Malaysia, Tel: 0060137576114; E-mail: smanshad12@yahoo.com Received date: June 11, 2016; Accepted date: November 05, 2016; Published date: November 12, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Manshad S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract Among many purification processes, pervaporation is one of the promising technologies which is an indispensable component for chemical separations with low energy consumption, minimum contamination and ability to break up azeotropic mixtures. The key success of pervaporation process is dependent on the membrane features (chemical components and morphology). Application of membranes surveyed in three categories included organic solvent dehydration, removal of organics from solvent and separation of organic solvents. This article review discusses different types of pervaporation membranes from the perspective of membrane fabrication and materials in biofuel products. Keywords: Pervaporation; Liquid mixture; separation technology; Difusion Introduction Pervaporation (PV) process is a process for liquid mixture separation in a liquid phase. Tis process is able to separate diferent components from mixtures such as water/organic, organic/water and organic/organic mixtures. Pervaporation process works by placing a liquid mixture to be separated (feed) in contact with one side of a membrane. Across the membrane, the chemical potential gradient works as the driving force for the mass transport of the materials. Also, using vacuum pump or an inert purge (normally air or steam) on the permeate side can help to maintain of a suitable permeate vapor pressure. Usually the kept pressure is lower than the partial pressure of the feed liquid. Finally, the permeated product (permeate) can be removed from the other side with low pressure vapor (Figure 1). In terms of the application or nature of the experiment, the permeate vapor may be collected afer condensation or released if desired. Basically, hydrophilic and hydrophobic membranes apply to separate the aqueous solutions and organic solvents from water mixtures, respectively [1]. PV separation technology has superiority to other separation technologies due to the separation mechanism which is based on the diference in sorption and difusion properties of the feed substances as well as perm-selectivity of the membrane. Tis mechanism is not dependent on the relative volatility of components [2,3]. Pervaporation survives the challenge of phase change by two aspects. First, pervaporation uses even with the minor components (usually less than 10 wt.%) of the liquid solutions, and second, pervaporation applies the most selective membranes. An efcient membrane need to the suitable membrane materials which can prominent efciency of performance in the PV performance. Since the minor feed components consume the latent heat, therefore PV techniques reduce energy during the process. Figure 1: Schematic Diagram of pervaporation process. Te second feature generally allows pervaporation the most efcient liquid-separating technology. Take the separation of isopropanol/water mixtures for example, if water content in the feed stream is 10 wt. %, the maximum single plate separation factor (isopropanol to water) in the fractional distillation is about 2. However, a pervaporation membrane can normally ofer a one-through separation factor (water over isopropanol) of 2000–10,000 [4-6]. Furthermore, combination of these two features ranks pervaporation the most cost-efective liquid separation technology [7]. In addition, pervaporation also demonstrates incomparable advantages in separating heat sensitive, close-boiling, and azeotropic mixtures [8-10] due to its mild operating conditions, no emission to the environment, and no involvement of additional species into the feed stream. Most of the membrane materials used in PV techniques are usable in laboratory scale, but not in industrial applications. Tus, there is a need to survey more Manshad et al., J Membr Sci Technol 2016, 6:4 DOI: 10.4172/2155-9589.1000164 Review Article Open Access J Membr Sci Technol, an open access journal ISSN:2155-9589 Volume 6 • Issue 4 • 1000164 Journal of Membrane Science & Technology J o u r n a l o f M e m b r a n e S c i e n c e & T e c h n o l o g y ISSN: 2155-9589