High-hydrophobic -CF3 groups within PTFPMS membrane for enhancing the furfural pervaporation performance

Abstract A high hydrophobicity of membrane plays a vital role in separating organics from dilute solution by pervaporation, which highly contributes to the increase of organics selectivity. Herein, we chose the high-hydrophobic poly[(3,3,3-trifluoropropyl)methylsiloxane] (PTFPMS) material to prepare the pervaporation membrane using a green method for the first time. Within the PTFPMS membrane, the -Si-O- chains imply the hydrophobic nature, and introducing CF3 groups further enhances the hydrophobicity. The high-efficiency transport pathways are formed in which water will experience a larger diffusion resistance within PTFPMS membrane compared with the conventional polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membrane without CF3 groups. Moreover, considering the great threat of organic solvent to the environment and operators during membrane preparation, a green approach using water instead of organic solvent was employed. Especially, when separating 1 wt% furfural aqueous solution at 80 ℃, there are 30% of increase in the furfural separation factor (45.6) and an effective increase in furfural flux (328 g m−2 h−1) compared with those of PDMS membrane. Overall, the super-hydrophobic PTFPMS membrane highly improves the feasibility of the downstream processes for recovering the biomass derives furfural.