Nowadays, alternative renewable energy has become an attractive choice of fuel due to increasing in price of fuel, serious shortage of fossil resources and environmental concern. One of the most common renewable biofuels today is bioethanol (gasohol). Generally, ethanol used in gasohol is derived from the distillation process that requires high energy consumption and high operating cost. Therefore, other alternative techniques are preferred in order to reduce the gasohol production cost. Pervaporation (PV) is especially attractive separation technique due to its higher separation efficiency and potential savings in capital and energy consumption. In this work, a newly developed polybenzoxazine-based membrane was used to separate water and ethanol. By mixing cardanol into benzoxazine prepolymer prior to the membrane fabrication process, the membrane swelling due to ethanol absorption was greatly reduced. The effects of cardanol content and feed concentration on the permeation flux and separation factor were investigated.
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