Architectural design of ceramic membranes to decouple mechanical strength and gas permeance for energy and environmental sustainability

Asymmetric silicon carbide (SiC) ceramic membranes exhibit significant potential for high-temperature ultrafine particle capture in industrial applications, which showed great prospects in energy and environmental areas. However, the high permeance and high strength of the ceramic membranes are often difficult to obtain simultaneously. The traditional asymmetric ceramic membranes composed of particle stacking have better mechanical strength, while their high mass transfer resistance leads to lower gas permeance. Increasing the overall porosity of ceramic membranes can effectively reduce the mass transfer resistance, but their relatively lower strength is not conducive to industrial applications. Herein, we propose a phase inversion strategy to create a defect-free and high-porosity membrane layer on a rigid macroporos support. This innovative structural design enhances the gas permeance and mechanical strength of the ceramic membrane simultaneously. The resulting ceramic membranes exhibited excellent gas permeance between 385.2 to 447.3 m³·m^-2·h^-1·kPa^-1 with average pore size ranging from 3.26 to 3.89 μm and a bending strength exceeding 20 MPa. Notably, the Darcy permeability coefficient of the ceramic membrane prepared in this work was more than twice that of the widely recognized commercial Pall Schumalith filter (with a pore size of 5 μm) from the authoritative Pall Corporation. The computerized tomography (CT) results indicated that the membrane layer possessed high connective internal channels. Furthermore, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was employed to verify the substantial superiority of the high porous finger-like pores in reducing the mass transfer resistance. Additionally, the SiC membranes presented a superior removal efficiency of over 99.93% and an excellent regeneration performance when capturing nano-sized particles with ultrafine particles at high temperatures, demonstrating satisfactory potential in ultrafine particle capture at extreme environments.