New membrane technology presents a low-energy alternative to conventional crude oil refining

A team of international researchers, including Edinburgh’s McKeown Group, have created a new way to form the separating layers in polymer membranes for molecular separations.

The study, published in Science and titled "Ultrathin polymer membranes with locked intrinsic microporosity for hydrocarbon fractionation", presents a new class of ultrathin polymer membranes that can rapidly and selectively separate complex hydrocarbon mixtures, potentially transforming how crude oil is refined and refinery streams are processed.

Conventional crude oil refining relies on thermal distillation, a process that consumes vast amounts of energy and accounts for around one percent of global energy use.

Alongside co-corresponding author Professor Neil McKeown, the paper’s authors include McKeown Group members Dr Chunchun Ye and Dr Yihao Guo. Chunchun carried out her PhD in the McKeown Group before continuing as a postdoctoral researcher between Edinburgh and Queen Mary University of London, where she focused on application-driven PIM materials design for real-world energy and environmental separations. This included the PLIM membrane work reported in the Science study, which translates PIM molecular design into ultrathin membranes for crude-oil separation. She has now gone on to take up an independent academic position as a Nanyang Assistant Professor at NTU Singapore. Yihao was a PGT student in the group and has just completed his PhD.

The McKeown group are partners in SynHiSel, a £9M EPSRC-funded programme grant (EP/V047078/1) bringing together leading UK researchers to develop high-selectivity membranes for sustainable separations.

This new technology is built on Polymers of Intrinsic Microporosity, or PIMs, a family of rigid, solution-processable microporous polymers pioneered by Professor Neil McKeown and collaborators and developed over many years in the McKeown Group. PIMs provide interconnected molecular-scale free volume for rapid molecular transport, and the PLIM strategy extends this platform by locking that microporosity into ultrathin separating layers for challenging liquid separations.

Neil and Chunchun outside the School of Chemistry

Read the paper in Science

My scientific identity as a PIM researcher was shaped by Neil and the McKeown Group at Edinburgh, and I’m grateful to carry that training and spirit into my own work at NTU Singapore. Neil taught me how to design and synthesise PIM materials, and his steady trust and support in bringing Edinburgh’s PIM expertise into the wider collaboration were central to this work. It was a real team effort, with key contributions from Edinburgh colleagues, including Yihao and Gary, alongside essential expertise from our collaborators in membrane formation, scale-up and real crude-oil separation.

This was a fun and very challenging project based on PIMs that we first developed over a decade ago for gas separations. Chunchun, with the help of Yihao, guided the research into the new and very active area of crude oil refining. This required a collaboration with the Livingston Group at QMUL for the fabrication and testing of the separation membranes, so Chunchun moved to London to ensure the success of the work. It is clear that she will now have a very successful independent career working on membranes in Singapore and I’m looking forward to seeing what her group achieves over the coming years.

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