EFFECT OF FEED TEMPERATURE AND COMPOSITION OF PROPANE ON THE SEPARATION OF CARBON DIOXIDE – METHANE – PROPANE BY USING HOLLOW FIBER MEMBRANE

Carbon dioxide, CO2 is known with its corrosive properties when react with water. Therefore, CO2 is needed to be removed from the natural gas to avoid it from damaging the pipelines and equipment. Nowadays, there are a lot of method to separate CO2 from natural gas such as physical absorption, chemical absorption, adsorption process and also membrane technology. A simple technology such as membrane technology is suggested to be applied to remove CO2 from natural gas especially at remote and unattended situation like offshore area. This is because separation using membrane technology is known with its high efficiency and less cost. However, the research conducted on multi-component separation of CO2 from natural gas using hollow fiber membrane is very limited nowadays. Most of them are more focusing on binary component separation. So, this project is conducted to study evaluate the permeability of multi-component separation of CO2-Methane-Propane by changing the parameters which are feed temperature and composition of propane. First of all, the hollow fiber membrane is potted into the module shell before tested at the test rig. The experiment is conducted by using Carbon Dioxide Separation Membrane Unit (CO2SMU) facilities. The result obtained from this experiment will be used to analyze between the membrane permeability and the parameters. Based on result, the permeability is decrease as the feed temperature increase. Meanwhile, as the propane composition is increases, the permeability is also decrease.