Sensing of Water in Microaqueous Solvents by Highly Selective Membrane Permeation

摘要

Our work relates to the need for an on-line method to rapidly and accurately detect water in hexane during enzymatic catalysis. The sensing principle reported here relies on selective permeation of water through a polymeric membrane. Our sensing principle employs the transport of water (exploiting both diffusion and sorption) rather than relying only on the sorption of the analyte into a polymer. The combination of water sensing and on demand water addition/removal using identical membrane devices to enable true process control of the water concentration in technical systems is discussed.