Customer Value
CMS products enable large industrial capital-intensive operations to reduce risk, increase yield, lower costs, and operate in a greener, cleaner, and more efficient way: enabling the economic viability of newly emerging renewable sources of energy, and improving the efficiency and safety of the existing energy and industrial infrastructure.
CMS solutions are used in electrical generation, pharma synthesis, wind turbines, paper mills, nuclear power plants and more, each with products operating in mission critical applications.
CMS continues to address industry’s unmet needs in challenging separations with new product innovations, active research, and custom amorphous fluoropolymers.
Expertise
Technologically, CMS’ strength centers on membranes and thin films composed of highly fluorinated polymers with exceptional gas transport properties and chemical resistance, which provide performance and cost superiority to conventional alternatives.
CMS membranes are chemically compatible with a wide range of chemicals and are resistant to surface fouling. The polymer structure has a high free volume and can also be easily cast into very thin composite membranes (nonporous perfluoropolymer on a variety of porous supports) without sacrificing solute retention.
These two factors enable fabrication of membranes that provide a desirable combination of high permeation rates and high solute retention, minimizing membrane area requirements.
Customer Needs: Membrane Contactors
Many manufacturing processes require the separation of gases, removal of dissolved gases from liquids, or dispersion of gases into liquids. In addition to other technologies, CMS has developed membrane contactors specifically for gasification/degasification and dehydration applications. The highly gas permeable CMS membranes allow the application of either sweep gas or vacuum to remove unwanted gas or water vapors from liquids over a large surface area without the problems (bulkiness, foaming, material loss, channeling, pressure control, etc.) associated with mechanical gas-liquid contactors. Applications for gassing and degassing process fluids exist in dozens of industries and commercial areas including
- energy & power production & distribution
- semiconductor & microelectronics
- food production and packaging
- pollution control & environmental remediation
- petroleum hydrocarbon processing
- sterile humidification and dehumidification
- feedstock and polymer chemical processes
- fine chemicals
- pharmaceutical & bioreactors
- inkjet inks for commercial printing processes
- micro-gravity
- analytical
Technology
CMS’ Membrane Contactors are uniquely defined by the high resistance to wet-out by low surface tension liquids, high productivity, and chemical inertness of our nonporous fluoropolymer membranes. Removal of gases from low surface tension liquids is uniquely suited to ‘organophobic’ and ‘oleophobic’ fluoropolymer membranes. CMS fluoropolymer membrane modules have been demonstrated to degas naphthenic lubrication oil at temperatures as high as 100°C.
CMS makes the highest mass transfer membrane contactors that are:
- Chemically compatible with virtually all acids, bases, solvents and hydrocarbons
- Will not allow direct contact between gas and liquid phase process streams, while allowing rapid mass transfer of permeating species between the streams
- Low fouling/easy cleaning surface
- Allows smallest practical device footprints and operating energy
Unique Characteristics of CMS flouropolymer membrane contactors
- Highest gas flux (permeance) of any nonporous/non-wetting gas transfer membranes
- Nonporous, non-wetting surface compatible with low surface-tension ‘wetting’ fluids (alcohols, hydrocarbons, solvents, aqueous surfactant solutions, blood plasma) that would quickly seep through conventional hydrophobic microporous membranes (e.g. polysulfone, polypropylene, polyvinylidene fluoride, and expanded polytetrafluoroethylene)
- Chemically resistant to most aggressive gases or liquids
- Bubbleless gasification/degasification, (low agitation and shear)
- Very low levels of extractables (in all-fluoropolymer modules)
- Low fouling/easy cleaning