Upcycled plastic membrane helps clean up waste

Plant-derived biosolvents enable the sustainable conversion of plastic waste into valuable membrane materials

10-Feb-2023 - Plastic waste can be used as a raw material for making high performance porous membranes. These could then be used in the chemical industry for the energy-efficient separation of complex chemical mixtures or to clean up waste streams, furtheradding to the environmental appeal of the ...

Greening hydrocarbon separation and crude oil refining

Polymer-based membranes that selectively separate hydrocarbon and crude oil mixtures could eclipse current industrial thermal processes

01-Sep-2022 - Polymer-based membranes developed at KAUST could enable greener and cheaper industrial separation approaches. Their stability and selectivity can be tuned by thermal crosslinking to separate simple hydrocarbon mixtures and complex crude oil fractions. Separation processes, such as distillation ...

Fine-tuned hydrocarbon separation at low energy cost

Metal organic framework membranes that selectively separate hydrocarbons set the stage for more sustainable petrochemical processes

24-Sep-2021 - An electrochemical approach developed at KAUST produces molecular-sieving membranes that could enable a cheap energy-efficient separation of light hydrocarbons, such as olefins and paraffins. This separation, critical for the petrochemical industry, usually relies on extremely energy-intensive ...

A cool chemical separation technology

A diverse category of porous materials can separate and purify key industrial chemicals at low temperatures

11-Mar-2021 - Gas and liquid separation processes in the chemical industry could be made more efficient and environmentally friendly by using substances known as intrinsically porous materials (IPMs). KAUST researchers review the prospects for IPMs in the journal Accounts of Chemical Research. Niveen Khashab ...

Separating gases using flexible molecular sieves

04-Dec-2020 - Researchers at the University of Liverpool and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have made reported some exciting findings relating to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of porous materials, which could benefit a wide range of important gas separation ...

A chemical embrace from the perfect host

01-Apr-2020 - An industrial process that currently consumes vast amounts of energy in petrochemical plants around the globe could be replaced by an alternative process so efficient that it requires no heating or elevated pressure. Niveen Khashab from KAUST's Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials Center and ...

Crystals that clean natural gas

31-Oct-2018 - Removing the troublesome impurities of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2) from natural gas could become simpler and more effective using a metal-organic framework (MOF) developed at KAUST. Upgrading natural gas in this way could help Saudi Arabia to make greater and cleaner use of ...