Abstract
Recently, high-free volume, glassy ladder-type polymers, referred to as polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIM), have been developed and their reported gas transport performance exceeded the Robeson upper bound trade-off for O-2/N-2 and CO2/CH4. The present work reports the gas transport behavior of PIM-1/silica nanocomposite membranes. The changes in free volume, as well as the presence and volume of the void cavities, were investigated by analyzing the density, thermal stability, and nano-structural morphology. The enhancement in gas permeability (e.g., He, H-2, O-2, N-2, and CO2) with increasing filler content shows that the trend is related to the true silica volume and void volume fraction. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.