Sustainable fabrication of large-scale tubular LTA zeolite membranes by a simple wet gel conversion

Sustainable fabrication of LTA zeolite membranes was explored on the macroporous α-Al2O3 tubes by a simple wet gel conversion method with largely reduced gel consumption. The method was mainly composed of three steps: 1) water dipping of LTA seeded support 2) gel dipping 3) gel conversion into LTA membrane without any additional gel solution in the autoclave. LTA zeolite membrane under an optimized synthesis condition on the 5 cm support showed good permeation flux of 2.56 kg/(m2·h) with prominent separation factor of near 9000 for the dehydration of 90 wt % ethanol/10 wt % water mixture at 75 °C by pervaporation. Based on the optimized synthesis conditions, high performance large-scale tubular LTA zeolite membranes were further synthesized on the 80 cm α-Al2O3 tubes for the first time, demonstrating that this method offered exciting opportunities for the preparation of zeolite membranes with largely reduced raw materials consumption and waste production.