Recovery of Sevoflurane Anesthetic Gas Using an Organosilica Membrane in Conjunction with a Scavenging System

Approximately 95% of the anesthetic gas administered to a patient is exhaled and ultimately released into the atmosphere. Most anesthetic gases have high global warming potential and so this approach adds significantly to the global greenhouse gas footprint. In this work, we develop a feasible means to capture such an anesthetic gas (sevoflurane) before it is released to the hospital scavenging system so that it is retained within the anesthetic circuit. Sevoflurane is retained using a microporous 1,2-bis(triethoxysilyl)ethane (BTESE) membrane prepared by a sol-gel method. The use of a ceramic membrane facilitates sanitization at high temperatures. A rapid thermal processing (RTP) technique is employed to reduce production time and to create a looser organosilica network, resulting in higher gas permeances, compared with the membrane synthesized from conventional thermal processing. The RTP membrane shows a slight decline in gas permeance when used with a dry mixture of CO 2 /N 2 /sevoflurane. This permeance falls again under 20% relative humidity feed conditions but the CO 2 /sevoflurane selectivity increases. The membrane performance shows little variation when the relative humidity is further increased. These promising results demonstrate that this microporous BTESE membrane has great potential for the recovery of sevoflurane in an anesthetic application.