Investigation the Effect of Nanocomposite Material on Permeation Flux of Polyerthersulfone Membrane Using a Mathematical Approach

Integrally skinned asymmetric membranes based on nanocompositepolyethersulfone were prepared by the phase separation process using the supercritical CO2 as a nonsolvent for the polymer solution. In present study, the effects of temperature and nanoparticle on selectivity performance and permeability of gases has beeninvestigated. It is shown that the presence of silica nanoparticles not only disrupts the original polymer chain packing but also alters the chemical affinities of penetrants in polyethersulfone matrices. Because, in the presence of hydrophilic silica, CO2 affinity filler, hydrogen-bond interactions between the oxygen atoms of carbon dioxide and the hydrogen atoms of hydroxyl group on the nanosilica surface would take place at the interface and thus solubility and consequently permeability towards CO2 are higher in comparison with CH4 for the membranes. Furthermore, in present study, a novel mathematical approach has been proposed to develop a model for permeation flux and selectivity performance of the membrane using Support Vector Machine. SVM is employed to develop a model toestimateprocess output variables of a nanocomposite membrane including permeation flux and selectivity performance. Model development that consists of training, optimization and test was performed using randomly selected 80%, 10%, and 10% of available data respectively.