Hydrocarbon separation relies on energy-intensive distillation. Membrane technology can offer an energy-efficient alternative but requires selective differentiation of crude oil molecules with rapid liquid transport. We synthesized multiblock oligomer amines, which comprised a central amine segment with two hydrophobic oligomer blocks, and used them to fabricate hydrophobic polyamide nanofilms by interfacial polymerization from self-assembled vesicles. These polyamide nanofilms provide transport of hydrophobic liquids more than 100 times faster than that of conventional hydrophilic counterparts. In the fractionation of light crude oil, manipulation of the film thickness down to ~10 nanometers achieves permeance one order of magnitude higher than that of current state-of-the-art hydrophobic membranes while retaining comparable size- and class-based separation. This high permeance can markedly reduce plant footprint, which expands the potential for using membranes made of ultrathin nanofilms in crude oil fractionation.

中文翻译：

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疏水性聚酰胺纳米膜为原油分离提供快速传输

烃分离依赖于能量密集型蒸馏。膜技术可以提供一种节能的替代方案，但需要通过快速液体传输来选择性区分原油分子。我们合成了多嵌段低聚物胺，它包含一个中央胺链段和两个疏水低聚物嵌段，并使用它们通过自组装囊泡的界面聚合制备疏水聚酰胺纳米膜。这些聚酰胺纳米膜提供的疏水性液体传输速度比传统亲水性对应物快 100 倍以上。在轻质原油的分馏中，将薄膜厚度控制到约 10 纳米，可实现比当前最先进的疏水膜高一个数量级的渗透性，同时保持可比较的基于尺寸和类别的分离。这种高渗透性可以显着减少工厂占地面积，从而扩大了在原油分馏中使用由超薄纳米膜制成的膜的潜力。