THE SEPARATION OF CARBON DIOXIDE – METHANE – PROPANE BY USING HOLLOW FIBER MEMBRANE: EFFECT OF FEED PRESSURE AND CO2 COMPOSITION

Carbon dioxide, CO2 is known with its corrosive properties when dissolved in water. Therefore, CO2 is needed to be removed from the natural gas to avoid it from damaging the pipelines and equipment due to its corrosive properties. There are a lot of method to separate CO2 from natural gas however membrane technology can be considered one of the methods which offers the largest potential in terms of economic feasibility especially in offshore. However there is lack of studies on the effects of multi component feed on the carbon dioxide separation using a membrane. Hence, the main objective of this project is to evaluate the permeance and relative permeance of commercial hollow fiber membrane under different feed pressure and feed CO2 composition using CO2-CH4-C3H8 as feed. A hollow fiber membrane module is prepared to conduct the lab experiments. Using the prepared module, experiments on the effect of feed pressure and CO2 composition in feed was conducted. The results obtained was analyzed to study the effect. From the analysis, it is learned that the permeance and relative permeance of CO2 increase with pressure in the range of 10 to 18 bar. The permeance and relative permeance of CO2 also increases when CO2 composition is increased from 16 Vol. % CO2 to 67 Vol. % CO2.