Unusual Glassy Polymer Membranes for High Gas Permeation

We show that thermal rearrangement of glassy polymers below the thermal degradation temperature can create unexpected and large microvoids in the membranes, leading to unexpected high gas permeability with high gas selectivity. These current polymer membranes display unexpected gas permeation-separation performance. There are above the upper-bound for conventional polymer membranes for several gas pairs. In the present study, molecular simulation, BET sorption, positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS), and gas separation experiments were performed to characterize the unusual structure-property relationship of these rigid glassy polymer membranes.