TERMINERT: Advancement of carbon membranes for extended life time for biogas upgrading operation and high temperature gas separation

MemfoACT AS is a Norwegian company formed in 2008 which produces an efficient, compact and sustainable system for biogas upgrading to fuel quality bio-methane based on hollow fibre carbon membranes. This pioneering technology aims to make the production of fuel economically attractive even for small and medium sized biogas plants. The motivation behind this project is that MemfoACT with its full scale pilot installation have experienced a significant drop in productivity of the modules over time due to a ging of the carbon membrane. While MemfoACT's membranes have demonstrated excellent initial performance for the upgrading of biogas to bio-methane, a significant loss in the performance has been observed over time. Therefore, it is essential that MemfoACT introduce methods for extending the life time of their carbon membranes if the product is to be competitive in the biogas market. The underlying idea of this project is to increase the life-time, performance and hence competitiveness of the membranes mo dules. This will be done through two steps which will allow the membrane module to function at higher temperatures and facilitate regeneration of the membranes in the modules after extended periods of operation. This will be realised by the integration of a new conducting sealing material which can tolerate operating temperatures over 100°C and secondly by the development of a regeneration technique such as thermal, electrical or chemical regeneration. This project will be a collaboration between Memf oAct AS as the main applicant ,with SINTEF Materials and Chemistry and NTNU as R&D partners. SINTEF has extensive experience in the fields of sealing materials (Dr. Ove Paulsen), membranes and electrochemistry (Dr. Edel Sheridan) . Ass. Prof. Fride Vullu m-Bruer who will supervise a post-doc on this project at at NTNU has very relevant experience from work with sold oxide fuel cells (SOFC), gas separation membranes and carbon materials.