In Situ Polymerized Poly (p-phenylenediamine)/Polyethylene Oxide Mixed Matrix Membranes for Efficient CO₂/N₂ Separation

Abstract

The trade-off effect of polymer membranes induced by molecular chains entanglement and tight packing remains a key bottleneck restricting their widespread application in the carbon capture field. This study fabricates a novel facilitated transport mixed matrix membrane by employing polyethylene oxide (PEO) as the continuous phase and poly (p-phenylenediamine) (PpPD) as the dispersed phase through an in-situ polymerization strategy. Low-concentration of PpPD nanoparticles can be uniformly dispersed in the PEO cross-linked network, which not only modulates the PEO chains packing, restricting its segmental motion, but also significantly enhances the CO₂/N₂ separation performance of the membrane via CO₂-philic amino groups in PpPD. This strategy effectively avoids the interfacial defect between PpPD fillers and PEO matrix in traditional technology, and the optimized membrane of IP/PEO achieves CO₂ permeability of 721.5 Barrer and CO₂/N₂ selectivity of 49.0, which exceeds the 2008 Robeson upper bound.

Keywords

in situ polymerization / interfacial compatibility / poly (p-phenylenediamine) / polyethylene oxide

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2026 The Author(s). Carbon Neutralization published by Wenzhou University and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.