Membrane Reactors for Process Intensification: Recent Advances and Key Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Coupling industrial development and environmental protection is one of the most important challenges for the next few years. From the industrial revolution in the earliest nineteenth century, both the continuous growing population and industrialization of processes have provoked an associated increase of energy demand, waste generation, and pollutants emissions in both water resources and the atmosphere. This human impact on the environment needs to be mitigated during the next few years in order to ensure better sustainability. Among the most popular proposals recommended by scientists as a roadmap, the substitution of the current energy model based on fossil fuels by renewable energies and hydrogen, the reduction of current energy requirements, and the promotion of wastes valorisation into new materials and/or new energy resources can be highlighted. However, CO₂ capture processes and wastewater treatments will also be necessary in the meantime to recover previous levels of pollutants in the environment. Of course, the improvement of efficiency in current processes, especially inside the chemical industry, would clearly help to achieve all these goals. In this context, the use of membranes and membrane reactors appears as an attractive technology to be taken into account for ensuring high-purity products with relatively low energy requirements. In fact, membrane reactors are able to integrate both chemical reaction and separation steps in a unique device, providing multiple benefits such as the reduction of the amount of equipment in industrial plants or the possibility to overcome the thermodynamic equilibrium restrictions.

The current Special Issue aims to collect some of the most recent advances in this field, covering from membrane and membrane reactor designs to particular applications in which the use of this technology provides clear advantages against other conventional processes schemes.

Dr. David Alique
Guest Editor

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