Introduction to Liquid Membranes What is a Liquid Membrane?

A Liquid Membrane is just what it sounds like. A membrane made of liquid. It really isn't that outlandish of an idea; it's a simple membrane principle, just with a non-rigid material. And because of the nature of a liquid, liquid membranes circumvent problems other, more conventional membranes encounter, but they run into a whole different class of problems. One of the benefits of using a liquid membrane is that LMs are highly selective, and, with the use of carriers for the transport mechanism, specific molecular recognition can be achieved. LMs are relatively high in efficiency, and as such, are being looked into for industrial applications. It is at this point that we run into the largest of problems. Stability. Liquid membranes require stability in order to be effective, and if they are pushed out of the pores or ruptured in some way due to pressure differentials or turbulence, then they just do not work. There are, in fact, two basic types of liquid membranes, an Emulsion Liquid Membrane (ELM), and an Immobilized Liquid Membrane (ILM), also called a Supported Liquid Membrane. An ELM can be thought of as a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble, and so on; the inner most bubble being the one recieving phase, all the others acting as separation skins with carriers inside, and anything outside the bubble being the source phase. In an ELM setup, there would be huge quantities of these bubbles, of course, all doing the same thing. An ILM is much simpler to visualize. Pretty much what you have is some other kind of rigid membrane, with lots of microscopic pores in it. Every one of these pores, then, is filled with this liquid, and in that liquid, you have the organic liquid and the carrier liquid. What happens then is that the ILM takes things from one side of the rigid membrane and carries it to the other side through this liquid phase. And that, my friends, is pretty a very brief model of what a LM is.

Where Are These Things Being Used?

The most promising avenue for new uses of liquid membranes resides mainly in the biochemistry and biological fields. The use of carriers utilizing proteins, antibiotics, or other molecules naturally found in cell membranes can provide fast, efficient, and almost continuous service for the researcher. Some possible uses for liquid membranes would be in the treatment of wastewater, the recovery of metals from dilute solutions, and for controlling certain problems in the oil well control industry.