High‐performance Polymer Membranes with Multi‐functional Amphiphilic Micelles for CO 2 Capture

Herein, we report a high performance polymer membrane with simultaneously large improvements in the CO 2 permeability and CO 2 /N 2 selectivity. These improvements are obtained by incorporation of a multi‐functional amphiphilic comb copolymer micelle, that is, poly(dimethylsiloxane)‐ g ‐poly(oxyethylene methacrylate) (PDMS‐g‐POEM), into a poly(amide‐ b ‐ethylene oxide) (Pebax) matrix. Both CO 2 and N 2 permeabilities continuously increased with PDMS‐g‐POEM content, whereas the CO 2 /N 2 selectivity increased up to 40 wt % of PDMS‐g‐POEM, which enabled the maximum performance to approach the upper bound limit (2008). The membranes with PDMS‐ g ‐POEM exhibited greater CO 2 permeability and CO 2 /N 2 selectivity than those with a zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF‐8), a well‐known expensive inorganic filler, indicating the effectiveness of PDMS‐ g ‐POEM micelles for CO 2 capture.