To help make the agricultural sector more sustainable, a team from KU Leuven designed a membrane with a green solvent strategy for biogas purification. ‘We’re not aiming at maximum process efficiency, but rather maximum affordability.’

Since governments, companies and research is increasingly moving away from fossil fuels, many researchers look at biogas as a viable alternative. Biogas is a byproduct of many agricultural activities and is often simply burned for heat or power. To make more efficient use of the valuable molecules hidden in the gas, you could purify it with membranes.

One of the ways to make these membranes is via non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS). ‘It’s a process where a polymer solution is turned into a solid, porous material by contact with a non-solvent’, explains Ivo Vankelecom, full professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering at the KU Leuven. Vankelecom, Amit Shenoy and colleagues designed such a membrane using polyimide Matrimid 5218s combined with green solvents, they report in the Journal of Membrane Science.