Exceptionally Fast Separation of Xylene Isomers with Zeolitic Nanotube Array Membranes

The separation of xylene isomers is of vital importance in chemical industry but remains challenging due to their similar structure and overlapping physiochemical properties. Membrane-based separations using the zeolite MFI, graphene oxide, and metal–organic frameworks have been intensively studied for this application, but the performance is limited by the well-known rule that the filtrate permeance scales inversely with the membrane thickness. We propose a novel membrane design that is capable of breaking this rule, based on an array of recently discovered zeolite nanotubes. Each zeolite nanotube possesses a 3.6-nm-wide central channel, connecting to dense, uniform 0.8-nm-wide holes on its wall that act as selective pores. Comprehensive molecular dynamics simulations show that this membrane exhibits permeance exceeding current state-of-the-art membranes by at least an order of magnitude while simultaneously maintaining an acceptable selectivity. In particular, a thicker membrane featuring longer zeolite nanotubes exhibits a higher permeance due to the presence of more selective pores. The proposed membrane design is expected to be broadly applied to other gas separations and even desalination as long as zeolitic nanotubes with customized pores are available.