Selective-Membrane Platforms was created in response to industry, to stimulate U.S. industry-academe-government partnerships for the technologically challenging R&D for agile and robust, high-selectivity/high-throughput, membrane-based separations technologies. Advances in separations technologies are needed to support more simple, efficient, safe, environmentally-benign, and economic manufacturing routes to high-performance products in areas as diverse as pharmaceuticals and medical diagnostics, automobile parts, consumer electronics, and clothing. The program will leverage the R&D investment required for a combination of material science and manufacturing technology advances, and will bring together vertically-integrated teams including knowledge providers, technology developers, engineering companies, and chemicals manufacturers (including the producers of specialty, pharmaceutical, and intermediate chemicals). The goal of this program is to develop a group of membrane platforms, i.e., families of membrane materials and modules that have broad ranging applicability (including difficult and high-value-added separations). Since the platforms developed during this program are expected to diffuse into many other applications, including commodity chemical production and petroleum refining, individual projects should provide visible demonstrations of successful "real world" applications that will lower the hurdle rate for subsequent installations of related, efficient membrane technologies across the chemical process and allied industries -- delivering added value to the combined $1.2 trillion value chains.

Beyond the results of individual projects, the program objectives of Selective-Membrane Platforms are to:

• create membrane technologies that offer step-change and simultaneous increases in selectivity and productivity, and that will be extendible to broad families of related separations problems;
• catalyze change in the chemical process industry's approach to core-process separations by providing the real-world operations data that will conclusively demonstrate the technical reliability of modern membrane materials for large-scale separations; and
• accelerate economic growth by fostering the formation of multi-disciplinary teams of knowledge providers, technology developers, systems integrators, chemicals manufacturers and high-volume end users to share the risk in speeding new platform technologies to large scale implementation.

The word "separations" identifies a generic process step used in the chemical and allied process industries. Separations are used to purify the raw materials, reaction intermediates, and final products that become the critical feedstocks for sustained growth and competitiveness of most manufacturing industries. Although the U.S. chemical process industry (CPI) showed $372.3 billion in revenues in 1996, including a $18.0 billion balance of foreign trade, ⁽¹⁾ much of its output stream is not obvious to the consumer. However, the CPI impacts our daily lives, and also supports the downstream innovations of other existing ATP focused programs through product applications such as:

• monomers for high-performance engineering plastics used in automotive components such as dashboards and bumpers, and composite materials (e.g., carbon fiber precursors and thermosetting plastics) suitable for structural applications,
• high-purity solvents and feedstocks for semiconductor wafer processing for the information revolution, and
• innovative specialty chemicals ⁽²⁾ used as reaction intermediates for ethical drugs, pesticides, and biomedical products -- including those specialty chemicals and biomedical products that will support future developments in tissue engineering.

The historic separations paradigm in the CPI has been based on simple equilibrium processes, primarily distillation. Although distillation is critical to the production of commodity chemicals, it provides too low a degree of selectivity for many emerging specialty chemicals applications, and its reliance on phase change (usually at elevated temperature or low pressure) makes it intrinsically unsuitable for others. In addition, distillation is often energy intensive and limited with respect to the product purities that can be achieved by either natural law or economics. Separations issues currently pose critical technology barriers to the emerging biochemical process industry, which is poised to expand the value and impact of the U.S. chemicals industry if pending separations barriers are overcome. Whether through the use of fermentation or other enzymatic catalysts, new and efficient processes to alternative fuels (e.g., ethanol), chemical feedstocks (e.g., 1,3 propandiol for novel polyester fibers), specialty chemicals (e.g., lactic acid for biodegradable packaging films), and custom chemicals (e.g., single isomers of chiral intermediates for ethical drugs with fewer side effects) will depend on advanced separations technologies with high throughput and molecular selectivity in order to be economically viable in downstream applications.

During the 1994-1995 time frame when an ATP focused program in "separations" was first being formulated, industry indicated a strong and coherent need for breakthrough R&D efforts to produce mass separating agents ⁽³⁾ for:

1. the separation of materials with similar physical properties, or
2. the concentration or removal of products or impurities from dilute aqueous or air borne streams.

These new agents would need to be reliable in extreme environments (e.g., extremes in temperature, pressure, pH, organic solvent strength, or corrosivity), or deployable in hybrid processes (e.g., combining reaction and separation into a single unit operation). Based on input from 50-plus industry white papers, several ATP-sponsored workshops on separations, and continuing industry- and professional association-sponsored meetings, there is broad industry consensus on the need to focus on innovative membrane-based separations technology. ⁽⁴⁾

A major milestone in establishing the current program scope and urgency was the Council for Chemical Research NICHE Conference 1997 Advanced Separations Technology, organized by participants from industry, academe, and government, and attended by a broad cross-section of industry and technology developers. It was at this meeting that industry put the challenge to ATP: create an initiative in highly-selective, membrane-based separations technologies that would finally catalyze the acceptance of membranes in core process operations of the specialty and commodity chemicals industry. Selective-Membrane Platforms is in direct response to this industry challenge.

• increased selectivity for the concentration, purification or recovery of chemical species that have only small differences in size, functional group, or structure;
• increased productivity available over a wide range of production scales and stream concentrations;
• robustness at extremes of pH, temperature or pressure, or resistance to hydrolysis, organic solvents, impurity poisoning or reactive mixtures; and
• attractive economics in use.

Candidate projects would be expected to fall within one of the following categories: (1) pilot scale installations of "step change" advances in membrane technology in core chemical processes, (2) pilot-scale installations of advanced state-of-the-art membrane technology in hybrid process configurations for core chemical processes, or (3) pre-production scale demonstrations of advanced state-of-the-art membrane technology in processes for high value-added products (e.g., specialty chemicals, monomers, or pharmaceuticals).

Exclusions. Proposals that WILL NOT be considered in scope include: exploratory searches for new membrane materials or catalysts for reactive membrane applications, development of new manufacturing technologies where the R&D focus is not focused on membrane and/or module performance (e.g., improving the resolution capability of photolithography as opposed to advances derived from membrane-surface modification), pilot-scale efforts emphasizing economic-demonstration objectives over R&D aimed at defined technical barriers, commercial-scale demonstrations, database activities and proposals directed solely at desalination, public water supply and environmental remediation markets. Proposals that otherwise meet the ATP funding criteria but are outside the scope of this focused program may be submitted to an ATP general competition.

Program scope. Considerable input from industry has outlined the need for the following innovative membrane-based technology platforms. Proposals are expected to address one or more of the following areas needed to create a selective-membrane technology. Non-enabling, point solution technology proposals are not acceptable. Proposals could include new membrane materials, module designs and/or process conditions to provide substantial improvements over current selectivity-speed-stability capabilities while still providing favorable economics with respect to capital investment and operating costs.

1. Higher productivity/higher selectivity/lower fouling membrane systems for bulk removal of solvents and/or water from dilute solutions.
2. Increased molecular level selectivity for continuous fractionation of molecules that have very little difference in size and shape.
3. Membranes with increased pore size uniformity and number density for continuous fractionation of colloids and microscopic particles (e.g., cells, ceramics, abrasives, etc.) that have very little difference in size and shape.
4. Robust membrane materials and modules that incorporate, at least, the best of current productivity/selectivity characteristics but that can be operated at extremes of temperature, pressure, pH, organic solvent power, or corrosivity/contamination.
5. Membranes that can be "tuned" to provide chemical selectivity suitable for fractionation of isomers including mixtures of chiral (mirror image) species.
6. Membranes whose separation mechanisms, material stability, and module robustness enable wide deployment in hybrid process with other conventional separation technologies, without significant re-engineering of materials when applied within broadly similar families of compounds (e.g., alcohols, polyols, ethers, esters).
7. Membranes, modules and systems incorporating design advances that decrease the installed cost (at equivalent productivity and selectivity) by at least 20% when compared to existing membrane, or competing commercial separation technologies.

In funding projects aimed at overcoming the technical challenges associated with these ideas, ATP requires that the proposed solutions include the development of a reliability-proven platform technology that could be adapted (e.g., by modifying the incorporated agents) for superior, cost-effective solutions to pervasive separations problems shared by the chemical, petroleum, mining and metal finishing, pulp and paper, semiconductor processing, food, agrochemical, and biochemical processing industries. The development of such selective-membrane based platforms will allow process industry engineers to choose appropriate solutions to provide more effective routes to product and profit, and ensure broad technological impact.

The following are generic examples of technology developments that would incorporate one or more of the advances listed above.

1. Membrane surface and process modifications. Polyamide thin-film composites and electron-beam grafting offer the potential to spatially alter membrane surface tension and/or chemistry, and provide a starting point for the development of imprinted membranes for molecular-recognition separations. On the process side, micrometer-scale surface texturing, innovative inter-membrane spacer designs, vortex flow concepts (e.g., hydrodynamic instabilities), spinning surfaces and integral "wipers" offer promise to decrease membrane fouling and provide more efficient designs for high-solids processing. The challenges are in matching membrane and module materials with economical manufacture (by technology innovators), designing innovative processes (by engineering design companies) and implementation (by end users).
2. Affinity membranes, (operated in both semi-continuous and continuous modes) incorporating chiral and molecular-recognition agents at high density at the membrane surface or within the membrane structure. Critical new application areas include the purification of chiral species and chemical isomers at the high volumes required for supplying reaction intermediaries to the specialty chemical markets that are developing to meet the chiral end-product needs of new ethical drugs, food and beverage additives, and herbicides and pesticides. Of interest are membrane materials that are suitable for deployment in the anticipated harsh reaction environments (e.g., phosphazene- and benzimidazole-base polymers and template-formed zirconia sol-gel inorganic materials).

3. Catalytic membranes, including zeolite/ceramic composites layered on a porous metal support. These may or may not require additional catalyst. ⁽⁶⁾ The resulting high-temperature capabilities provide for deployment in hybrid systems where the separations operation occurs simultaneously with reaction. Incorporation of such a membrane into a distillation-based process (i.e., catalytic distillation) is a potentially important scenario (e.g., catalytic distillation for ETBE or MTBE). Robustness under extreme reactor conditions leverages increased reaction yields and reduced by-product and waste production. The challenges are in materials development and increased module reliability under extreme-temperature cycling.

4. Tunable membranes, with controllable pore size or transport properties. Tunable selectivity is an elusive goal of modern separations technology. There are several emerging approaches to tunable selectivity, including chemical vapor deposition and grafting within membrane pore structures to vary pore size with nanometer (nm) resolution. Careful selection of the base membrane material and processing conditions provides tunability over the range 1 nm to 200 nm -- resulting in a highly variable manufacturing platform for multiple end-user applications. Electrochemical membranes or membranes made from conducting polymers (e.g., polypyrrole or polyaniline) or gels offer the end-user the opportunity to continuously tune process selectivity on-line in response to changing feed conditions or product specification for increased process agility. Material and manufacturing challenges are significant in both approaches.

It is believed that industrial uses within each of the above mentioned families of membrane innovation exist. Their technology development status ranges from proof of feasibility, to bench scale prototype, to proven small-scale applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are few examples of such innovation currently deployed in a commercial U.S. application for the manufacture of specialty or commodity chemicals. ⁽⁷⁾

Examples of "enabling" technology. Each family of novel membrane "systems" mentioned above represents a breakthrough technology platform. If the materials and manufacturing challenges can be solved for a lead application, there are potential platform extensions that will leverage this base-technology development in related separations challenges. For example:

• The semiconductor industry is in the process of developing manufacturing improvements using a slurry polishing step for the next generation of chips. To reuse the slurry a very selective separation will be required to remove gel and "off-sized" particles from the expensive slurry components -- a narrow size distribution of abrasive particles in a basic carrier solvent. Technology to do this is analogous to what will be required to improve homogeneous catalysis processes for making high-value monomers by enabling recovery of the very expensive (e.g., $10,000/lb) catalyst by selective filtration.
• New antibiotics and therapeutics are being identified from novel drug discovery processes, including combinatorial chemistry techniques. The synthesis approaches include traditional organic chemistry, and a membrane reactor/separator can possibly simultaneously overcome reaction equilibrium limitations and the expense and complexity of multiple liquid-liquid solvent extraction steps. The membrane would need to be solvent resistant, inert to the redox reaction species, and very selective because multiple steps each need high recovery (e.g., in a 48 step synthesis, 98% yield at each step results in a total yield of less than 40%).
• Solid electrolyte membranes that integrate oxygen separation show promise in hybrid reactors, which combine gas separation and catalytic oxidation, e.g., in the selective partial oxidation of hydrocarbons. Extensions of this technology to other high-temperature membrane reactors may have potential. This would include petrochemical processes such as dehydrogenation and hydrotreating of asphaltenes. Other extensions of this platform could include the development of improved synthesis processes where current catalyst and reactor technology is inadequate, or where the selective removal of reaction intermediates/products will enhance yield or catalyst lifetime. Several gas phase oxidation reactions including the production of ethylene oxide could benefit from this membrane platform. Indeed, an improved process for synthesizing new families of biodegradable polymers based on polymers of propionic acid can be envisioned (a $20 billion opportunity for replacing polyethylene in certain applications) -- formed directly from ethylene oxide and carbon monoxide versus the current, expensive lactone route.
• High-selectivity, high productivity, robust membrane materials may be used to help process dendritic polymers (e.g., "3-D snowflakes") for uses as a polymeric aerogel to provide low-dielectric insulating layers between silicon layers in multi-layer chip designs. Such low-dielectric insulators are becoming increasingly important for the anticipated high-density circuits anticipated in the Semiconductor Industry Association roadmap. Similar advanced membranes might also be useful for replacing chromatography in the recovery of fullerenes and carbon nanotubes (i.e., for possible uses in composites and non-linear optical materials) when potential commercial applications generate increased production demand.
• Chemical-specific membranes, based on molecular imprinting and controlled cross-linking, have the potential to provide effective separation of optical- and chiral isomers for a wide variety of products, including albuterol (asthma drug) and ditiazim (calcium ion blocker), L- and D-glutamic acid (food flavoring), and stereo-monomers for liquid crystal polymers (active matrix displays and high strength optical fibers). Developments will have uses across the spectrum of specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and agrochemical products.

The business objectives of candidate projects should target:

• delivering specialty chemicals that will enable the creation of new- or higher-performance consumer products along the value chain;
• providing greater than 20% cost reduction in a core-process separations operation; or
• creating new business opportunities.

Business goals The program focus on core-process applications guarantees that the new-platform technology solutions developed under this initiative will be applicable to a broad cross-cut of industries. Direct impact on the U.S. economy will be measured by the reduction in unit costs (i.e., raw material, energy, capital, operating and disposal), increase in production capacity and creation of new markets based on new- and high-performance materials. Indirect benefits in areas of enhanced environmental quality are also anticipated. The aim of Selective-Membrane Platforms is to develop breakthrough separations-technology platforms that push beyond the existing tradeoff relationships between selectivity and productivity for a variety of processes. In this section "breakthrough performance" is defined and examples provided in terms of suitable business goals for candidate proposals.

High performance products. New- and higher-purity products produced by the chemical industry can open new markets and enhance the performance of products manufactured by customers in the electronics, optics, and health care industries.

• Generic Goal: High productivity routes to chiral isomer purification. Specific Example: One year reduction in time-to-market and 50% reduction in developmental costs for enantiopure drugs enabled by advances in the recovery of chiral intermediates used in asymmetric synthesis would provide incremental revenues of $400 million to $750 million per major drug (a potential annual $5 billion to $10 billion incremental benefit to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry by 2020). If affinity membrane materials could leverage a 2.5-fold increase in the growth of chiral separating agents due to new and expanded markets created by the higher throughput of membrane materials, this would create new membrane markets of $3 billion within five years of introduction. ⁽⁸⁾

• Generic Goal: Step-change in product purity and productivity of ultra-pure solvents. Specific Example: Diverse industries such as semiconductor processing, pharmaceutical and nuclear power generation all require ultra-pure water. In 1992, the U.S. electronics industry, for example, spent over $350 million to purify 150 billion liters of water, nearly 1% of its $42 billion total sales. ⁽⁹⁾ Dissolved metals, ionic, and particulate impurities are a major limiting factor in achieving smaller feature size in high-density semiconductor devices. Water purity is a rising problem, in addition to cost, since a hundred-fold increase in purity levels is needed before manufacture of 1 Gbit chips can be commercialized. Water consumption by the U.S. semiconductor industry is anticipated to exceed $1 billion by 1997, and water is only one of a large number of ultra-pure process solvents (over 20 specialty acids and organic solvents) required by this critical industry. Projections of the value of high-purity to ultra-purity solvents (including water) to the semiconductor industry are in the range of $15 billion per year by 2015.

High-performance processes that reduce processing costs per unit product for existing processes by greater than 20%. This goal might be reached through: improved capacity, utilization of lower quality feedstocks or raw materials, reduced energy consumption or lower pollution abatement costs. However, given the large capital investment of most chemical process plants and the relatively cheap energy costs in the U.S. today, significant cost reductions for existing plants will generally be achieved through increases in capacity:

• Generic Goal: A 20% increase in production capacity. Specific Example: This level of capacity growth provided to a few major distillation processes (e.g., ethyl benzene/styrene, propane/propylene, and ethane/ethylene), through the development of high-temperature membrane materials for reactive distillation or for olefin-paraffin separations in the presence of sulfur compounds and acetylene, would provide a $20 billion annual increase in product ⁽¹⁰⁾ without additional plant investment, and create a $200 million market for these membrane materials.
• Generic Goal: A 20% - 40% reduction in energy costs. Specific Example: This level of energy savings for dehydration or dehydrogenation processes, through the development of a solvent- and poison-resistant membrane system, would support a $200 million market in such membrane materials.

Achieving these business goals will have secondary economic benefits through the sales or licensing of U.S. technology to countries expanding their chemical, petroleum, pulp and paper, mining and metals finishing, and food and beverage manufacturing sectors; through the generation of spin-off separation technologies usable in consumer markets; and through the exportation of advanced environmental technologies into the rapidly growing $150 billion world-wide market for water and air pollution control technologies. ⁽¹¹⁾ Additional economic benefits that should be quantified and articulated in proposals include impacts to the membrane market and new industry creation. Clear linkages between business goals and broad-based benefits should be clearly discussed in the commercialization pathway discussion.

Membrane market. Although membrane markets are often segmented by application (pharmaceutical vs potable water), media (air, aqueous or organic solvent), and materials (inorganic vs polymer) there are about 50 U.S. companies involved in the $2.5 billion worldwide market for membrane materials and modules. The material and manufacturing costs of the membrane itself represents approximately 30% of the cost of a membrane module. Sales of full membrane-based systems are currently in the $4 billion range (US), and are projected to grow to over $10 billion by 2005 (the value added by the system developer is of order 2.5-fold to 5-fold the value of the membrane and/or module).

Incorporating affinity agents into membrane platforms will provide a substantial opportunity to establish a leadership position in serving the rapidly growing specialty chemicals markets, and to expand markets currently being supplied at lower production capacity by highly selective chromatography resins. High-selectivity membrane materials are in an initial growth phase of their life cycle, and competition in developing and marketing new separating systems is increasing in intensity -- driven by the increased industry need for purer process stream inputs and product.

New-industry creation. Development of the membrane-based systems included in Selective-Membrane Platforms will be critical for moving the emerging biochemical process industry beyond small scale, high-value pharmaceuticals into the realm of specialty or even commodity chemicals. Cost-effective technology capable of dealing with this new "bio-chemicals" industry's projected product/waste stream matrix, production volumes and purification/recovery levels is an immense challenge. Innovative selective-membrane platforms that are suitable for the concentration, purification or recovery of small molecules from dilute solutions at high acidity are anticipated to simplify the manufacturing process for fermentation-based specialty chemical intermediates, and will provide consumer value through new-or lower-cost pharmaceuticals, food additives, and specialty monomer-based products. Success will lead to the emergence of small scale manufacturing facilities specializing in just-in-time production of high-value industrial chemicals -- the chemicals equivalent of the urban micro brewery. For example, a fermentation process for 1,3-propandiol, a versatile intermediate that is important in the specialty plastics value chain and which has potential as a non-toxic antifreeze replacement (potentially capturing a fraction of the current 2.4 billion kg U.S. production) is being developed by duPont.

Recovery and purification of product from fermentation reactors is best achieved by in-situ membrane techniques, i.e., as would allow the selective permeation of 1,3 propandiol or ethanol in the presence of water and other polar organic molecules. Beyond selectivity and productivity, many anticipated processes will share similar separations issues such as fouling prevention and robustness in a high solids environment. Technologies that enable a 50% reduction in the cost of removing excess water from fermentation broth (to $2.50 per ton-H₂O) will expand the chemicals-from-biomass industry (e.g., ethanol and organic acids) by more than $4 billion.

While innovative projects from single and joint venture applicants are welcome, the vertical and horizontal partnerships required to hasten the development of broadly applicable selective-membrane platforms seem particularly well suited to joint venture participation. Anticipating that many proposals will come from newly-forming joint ventures, a (non-obligatory) pre-proposal process will be used to stimulate potential proposing groups to solidify their ideas and divide responsibilities early. Although submission of pre-proposals will not be mandatory, feedback will be given promptly on degree of apparent technical risk; conformity to the concept of technology-platform development and impact on future acceptance of membranes in industrial applications; business and commercialization plans; and organizational structure and commitment.

The intent of this solicitation is to leverage ATP funding to support five to seven projects to move specific, high-selectivity membrane materials from proven laboratory feasibility through pilot-scale performance testing. A typical project might be of the order of $2 M to $3 M per year (total R&D funding), and extend over three to five years with industry providing over 50% cost-share.

A decade beyond a U.S. National Research Council Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology critical recommendation, the two most important generic research goals in separation science are to:

• develop highly selective agents that can discriminate among chemically similar species in a readily reversible process, and
• focus on processes and agents to selectively "pluck out" solutes from dilute solutions.

Today, there are still no substantial, federally funded programs aimed at developing advanced platform technologies to improve separation selectivities or to improve separations performance in dilute industrial process streams -- let alone a program aimed at commercial applications of these technologies. Mass separating technology has been called the "most important area of high technical risk requiring new innovation, and the area of chemical manufacturing where significant cost savings can be realized." ⁽¹²⁾

As a meaningful industrial technology, membrane-based separations (a mass separating technology) is only 20-30 years old and currently stands at a critical point in its evolution. There has been steady and profitable growth for the companies that manufacture and install membrane-based systems. The past competitive success of membranes (and their technological vision) has been fueled by their intrinsic advantages and the promise of exquisitely efficient separations being performed by biological membranes throughout the natural world. But the technological underpinnings of membranes (see table below) are complex and require significant advancement in both material science and manufacturing infrastructure in order to deliver on their promise.

Comparison of Minimum requirements for Operation of Several Separations Unit Operations (adapted from presentation of Raymond Zolandz, duPont Co.)

Separation Processes	Energy	Controlled Chemistry	Controlled Surface Structure	Controlled Three-dimensional Geometry
Distillation	X
Extraction	X	X
Equilibrium Adsorption	X	X
Kinetic Adsorption	X	X	X
Membrane Separation	X	X	X	X

Why ATP

ATP has the opportunity to implement a strong, national program in membrane-based systems for industrial applications that has been sorely needed by U.S. industry for the past decade -- to develop promising high-risk technical ideas to the point where they can be exploited commercially and result in lowered production costs or improved product performance. The vision of Selective-Membrane Platforms is to use a focused ATP technology development initiative to leverage public and private research investments in industry-academe-government partnerships to develop breakthrough-platform, membrane-based technologies that will be developed and validated at pilot or pre-commercial scale. Such developments will significantly lower the technology-related barriers to industry acceptance of membrane approaches to core-process separations operations.

Where federal funding for membrane-based separations exists, it is often channeled into in-house programs such as were funded out of the Bureau of Reclamation (about $12 million in funding, constant between 1986 and 1995), or to basic research projects such as funded by NSF (about $6.0 million, including bioseparations) and DOE (about $32 million, excluding isotopes and coal research) -- most of which goes to universities and national laboratories. In FY98 an initiative by DOE will include a small amount of funding for industry-led research in separations technologies (a solicitation in which catalysis, bioprocessess, separations technologies, and computational fluid dynamics will share $3.5 M to $5.0 M in first-year funding of multi-year projects).

R&D funding within the chemical industry has been flat over the last decade, currently around 4% of sales, or $12 billion. Separations unit operations represent a significant fraction of capital and operating expenses within the chemical industry, which drives priorities to short-term profitability goals. This incremental improvement focus has resulted in a dramatic decrease in high-risk technology investments for the development of new separations processes. Although chemical manufacturers have shown a willingness to implement major materials and processing advances when proven to be cost effective (e.g., recent advances to improve product capacity have included rotary bed continuous ion-exchange systems), industry finds it increasingly difficult to justify allocating resources for longer-term, high risk projects even though they might hold the promise of technological discontinuity.

Partnering with the ATP has had an effect on shifting the technology portfolio balance of the chemical processing industry. During the past few years ATP issued 10 awards for high-risk R&D projects of broadly enabling, innovative work in mass separating agents, with demonstrated benefit to the U.S. economy. These projects included applications of new high-selectivity membranes and sorbent materials, some of them in hybrid systems or under hostile process conditions. The average statistics for these awards were project lengths of 3.1 years and funding levels of $5.2 million, of which the average industry-cost share was 54%. It is in cross cutting applications that this technology has the highest potential for stimulating economic growth. Due to increased international competition, environmental regulations, and limited natural resources the next decade will be critical.

Why Today

ATP involvement in this developing area is critical today because:

• Traditional industrial separations technologies have reached limits in terms of optimization and agility;
• Advancement will require long term, multi-disciplinary ventures for the development and verification of new materials (e.g., sol-gel or zeolitic nanostructures) and new hybrid processing paradigms (e.g., membrane reactors) -- areas of high technology challenge;
• Technology developers (often small business) focus on niche market needs, and cannot efficiently access the full market opportunity needed to justify the development of new technology platforms;
• The critical players have limited experience with extended vertical alliances;
• Integrated approaches to R&D will help bring membrane development companies and end users together;
• There are no substantial, focused federal efforts in separations beyond basic science programs and nuclear remediation; and
• Step changes in separation or in hybrid reaction/separation technologies will have major economic consequences throughout the U.S. economy.

Selective-Membrane Platforms will bring chemical manufacturers, technology developers, academe and national laboratories, and manufacturing end users together to move the chemical process industry and all of its downstream customers into the 21st century.

To appreciate the broad potential benefits from this ATP focused program, consider the following two groups of separations technology users:

• Users of specialty-separation technologies, including the electronics, metal finishing, pharmaceutical, plastics & rubber, health care, food and beverage, and biotechnology industries.
• Users of high-volume-separation technologies, including the basic process industries: chemicals, agrochemicals, pulp & paper, water purification, extraction industries, and oil refining (petroleum) -- industries that provide the downstream manufacturing sectors with industrial feedstocks.

These technology users do not, in general, have the technological capability to develop the types of innovative selective-membrane platforms considered within this focused program. However, in the U.S. these two groups of separation technology users represent about $1.2 trillion in product shipments and over $500 billion in value-added to the U.S. economy. ⁽¹³⁾

The strongest long-term position of the U.S. CPI is in specialty chemicals. In the global chemical industry, approximately 95% of production mass is sold as commodity chemicals (where margins are measured in pennies per kilogram and labor, energy, and capital costs play a key role in competitiveness). However, approximately 30% of industry profit is provided by the about five-mass-percent that is subsequently refined/reacted and sold as specialty products. These are high value-added chemicals with market growth driven by developments in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, semiconductor, paper, and plastics industries. The historic distillation separations paradigm in the CPI, with its high temperatures and low selectivity, is intrinsically unsuitable for many modern specialty chemicals. Conversely, adsorbent resins, which offer higher molecular selectivity, have limited applicability in high-throughput commodity chemicals applications.

Partnerships. An ATP focused program in membrane separations will accelerate economic growth by fostering the formation of multi-disciplinary teams, typically including an academic innovator, a small business technology developer, a system integrator, and a chemicals or pharmaceuticals manufacturer. These types of teaming arrangements will allow developers to share the risk in speeding new technology to large scale, and encourage the creation of new, value-added markets.

The recently implemented Separations Tool Advisory (developed as a part of the Clean Process Advisory System of the AIChE Center for Waste Reduction Technologies) will provide one mechanism to make information about these emerging separations processes and related product design data broadly available to design engineers and end users.

Selective-Membrane Platforms traces its roots to an April 1994 NIST/ATP sponsored workshop on Chemical Manufacturing for the 21st Century. At this seminal meeting representatives of the U.S. chemicals industry (an industrial sector in which separations are involved in virtually every step in the manufacturing process) strongly supported a coherent program addressing cross-cutting separations needs. The 1994 workshop resulted in the submission of 19 industry-led white papers on technical challenges and innovations in mass separation agents. Separations and catalysis issues were the focus of an October 1994 workshop Research Opportunities in Pollution Prevention sponsored by the Council for Chemical Research and NIST's Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory. A program development workshop Separations Technologies: Challenges and Benefits was held at NIST in February 1995, attended by 81 representatives from over 45 different companies, and followed by additional industry input and white papers (for a total of 54 to date). ⁽¹⁴⁾ Attendees at this separations workshop represented modelers, materials and device developers and manufacturers, and end users. Although the white papers came largely from the chemical and allied processing industries, biochemical and agrochemical processing, semiconductor processing, paper and pulp, metals and mining sectors have been represented. Separations and catalysis were the joint foci of an October 1996 ATP workshop held in Boulder, CO. Pending industrial challenges and R&D directions were discussed at this meeting, which also showcased existing ATP projects in areas of catalysis, biocatalysis and separations and was attended by over 100 academic, industry, and government representatives.

Industry roadmapping. Selective-Membrane Platforms has been guided by the technology roadmapping established by the 1996 report Technology Vision 2020: The Chemical Industry, issued collectively by the ACS, AIChE, CMA, CCR, and the Synthetic Organic Chemistry Manufacturers Association (SOCMA). Two issues germane to this focused program are strongly emphasized in Vision 2020: ⁽¹⁵⁾

"Increasing global competition is requiring the need to deliver new high-performance products and processes to market more quickly, and at the lowest cost. [Included in the materials science challenges is the need to find new ways to improve and develop enhanced performance in] membranes for chemical processing, packaging, medical and other separations applications."

"Industry must accept responsibility for leading an expanded collaborative effort for industry, academe and government in research, [turning to the federal government] to help the U.S. chemical industry improve competitiveness by supporting long-term, high-risk research and development efforts."

Although new membrane materials are beginning to have the required selectivity and show potential for high-throughput applications, they do not have proven reliability in CPI applications.⁽⁵⁾ A major point made at the Council for Chemical Research NICHE Conference 1997 Advanced Separations Technology was that there are few examples of membrane implementation in commercially important commodity and specialty chemical applications due to substantial technical (e.g., membrane selectivity and reliability) and non-technical barriers. No one in the U.S. chemical process industry wants to be the first to replace functional unit operations with an "unreliable" membrane system -- they would all like to be second, however. Broad deployment of membrane-based systems in the areas of industrial gas processing (e.g., nitrogen for cryogenic and inerting applications; hydrogen recovery from purge gases) and solids recovery (food and electroplating applications) are strong indications of industry's willingness to rapidly adopt successful new technologies once they have been technically demonstrated to be reliable under industrial conditions, or where there are no viable alternatives.

1. "Facts and Figures for the Chemical Industry," Chemical & Engineering News June 23, 1997, p. 38.

2. "Product Report on Custom Chemicals," C&EN Feb. 3, 1997. This report defines specialty chemicals to include "fine chemicals" and "performance chemicals," among others. Performance chemicals enhance processing or end properties of products (e.g. plasticizer used in polymer films that are in turn used in automobile safety glass). Fine chemicals are bought for what they are rather than a specific function they will perform, and sell in the range $10/kg to $100,000/kg. The total world-wide industry is $36 Billion/year: 50% of which are made or consumed by the drug industry, 19% in agrochemicals, 6% in foods, 6% in flavors and fragrances, and 13% in other areas including biocides.

  3. Mass separating agents are materials or devices such as membranes, sorbents, molecular sieves, and microbes that are added to a process stream to enable separation based on a physical property change, or a rate or equilibrium based partitioning. This is in contrast to many classic separation processes that rely on a phase-change due to the addition or removal of energy (e.g., distillation, crystallization, or drying).

  4. A membrane is a thin film that separates two phases and selectively allows one or more components of one phase to pass into the other. The selectivity is based on the size and chemical nature of the components and the chemical and material properties of the membrane. The motive force for movement of components may be pressure, temperature, electric field gradient, or chemical concentration gradients (or combinations thereof). Membrane-based separations are unique in their usually lower energy requirements, compact size, simplicity, and ease of adaption to continuous and batch processes and multiple production scales. The simplest example of membrane separations is filtration. The most widespread membrane product application is in kidney dialysis.

5. Membranes to separate carbon dioxide from methane are commercially available and many installations have been operating. But several new applications that will expand the economic benefit require membranes that are more selective and robust toward process upsets. There are reports of large commercial installations that failed because of unanticipated poisoning by heavier hydrocarbons (either as condensates or vapor components). Knowledge of this experience has generated significant risk-aversion in the petrochemical industry. Simultaneous development of improved technology and large (successful) demonstration plants will advance the viability and acceptance of membrane separations throughout the industry. Howard Meyer, GRI and Tom Ratcliffe, Unocal, private communication (1997).

6. A "reactive membrane" project could, in principle, be submitted to both the ATP Catalysis and Biocatalysis and the Selective-Membrane Platforms focused program solicitations. To be "in-scope" for Selective-Membrane Platforms, such a proposal would have to 1) show how the proposed technology development represents an innovative separations platform and 2) how success would increase industry acceptance of membranes in core-process operations.

7. P. Bryan, private communication (1997).

8. Numbers related to specific products/processes are industry specific and typically considered company sensitive. The numbers used in this white paper to describe membrane markets and value chain characteristics are aggregates derived from proprietary market studies (see reference 9) to show typical trends in added-value. Engineering plastics in automotive applications was chosen for exemplification because this application lies between higher-end applications such as pharmaceuticals and lower-end applications such as herbicides.

9. Representative market studies include: "Inorganic Membranes: Markets, Technologies, Players," A. Crull, BCC Report GB-112R (1994); "Inorganic Membranes for Advanced Separations: Global Business Opportunities and Commercial Intelligence," Technology Catalysts International Corporation (1991); "Separation Technologies: Markets and Applications, R.F. Taylor, Decision Resources Report R911101 (1991); "Membrane Separations Technologies," B. Baumgartner, Freedonia Group (1994); and "U.S. Ultrafilter, Nanofilter, and Reverse-Osmosis Filter Elements Markets," Frost & Sullivan Report 5293-15 (1996).

10. "Top 50 Chemical Products," Chemical & Engineering News April 8, 1996, p30.

11. In addition to use in their core manufacturing operations, separation technologies are fundamental to emissions reduction operations in these industries, and in diverse service-sector businesses such as dry cleaners, restaurants, and gas stations. Although it is not the intent of this focused program to support the development of environmental technologies. A proposal targeted at an environmental "killer application" would be considered in-scope if: 1) the application were chosen based on economic benefits to the company and the U.S. economy, 2) there were clear pathways for platform extensions to specialty or commodity chemicals processing, and 3) success contributed substantially to the acceptance of membrane robustness for core processing applications. World market forecasts (Industrial Outlook 1994) for the environmental industry project capital expenditures for water treatment and air quality to grow to $125 billion by 2000 -- this is an area that will be broadly enabled by advances in mass separating agents, and that is dominated by small, high technology businesses. The enabling aspects of most mass separating agents ensures that technologies developed for core process applications will have few barriers to implementation in pollution control applications, especially at the in-process recycle phase. The inclusion of small-business technology developers, and system integrators on Selective-Membrane Platforms R&D teams should facilitate the spill-over of developing technologies into this environmental market.

12. "Separation and Purification: Critical Needs and Opportunities," National Research Council Committee on Separation Science and Technology, C.J. King, Chair (National Academy Press, Washington D.C.; 1987).

13. U.S. Industrial Outlook 1994, U.S. Department of Commerce (1995).

14. "Overview of Advanced Technology Program's Separations Workshop", D.S. King, L. B. Schilling, and J. Pellegrino, Proceedings of the 13th Annual Membrane Technology/Separations Planning Conference, Newton, MA. October, 23, 1995; Business Communications Corp., Norwalk, CT.

15. "Technology Vision 2020: The U.S. Chemical Industry, http://www.chem.purdue.edu/ccr/.

Date created: December 1997
Last updated: April 12, 2005