Foreword

The urgent need to reduce not only pollution, but energy use and energy waste is leading to an increasingly wider diffusion of environmentally friendly membrane systems. With the introduction of membrane operations for new demanding applications comes the need of developing tailored membrane materials with unprecedented performances and resistance to temperature, chemicals and solvents, at an affordable cost. Today, it is common practice to specifically engineer and tailor-make new polymeric, inorganic and hybrid membranes which meet the requirements of a given industrial application. It is trivial but new materials with improved properties are required to override some limitations in applications. Especially in membrane science novel substances may open up the possibility to improve the membrane stability, quality, and precision, therefore, adding more chances for a largely improved process control and so attaining the goal fast. However, even with excellent new materials, some questions have to be solved: How to engineer a membrane material and make real membranes for real applications? What is the state of the art of the materials sciences research behind such membrane engineering? What are the perspectives of the materials science of synthetic membranes? This book is written with these questions in mind. How membranes are employed in natural gas treatment, for the separation of organics, incorporated into fuel cells, and high- and low-temperature catalytic membrane reactors are just some of the topics covered within this volume.

The e-Book edited by Dr. M. Giovanna Buonomenna and Dr. Giovanni Golemme is of interest for not only specialists in membrane science and technology but also graduate students and researchers in chemical engineering, chemistry and materials science since Advanced Materials for Membrane Preparation links academic knowledge to both research know-how and the avant-garde industrial application of advanced membrane materials.