Hitachi Zosen Corporation (Hitz) has actively been engaged in developing a zeolite membrane element for dehydration and purification systems. Hitz specially designed and developed the alumina support tube having mono-block structure composed of a dense tube end, a porous tube body and a dense closed end. The element constituent involving only inorganic materials leads high durability performance. The dehydration system using Hitz membrane elements was adopted for the first commercial bio-ethanol plant with the capacity of 50,000 L/d in Japan. High performance properties of permeation flux, the selectivity and the durability of Hitz membrane elements have been demonstrated through the operation of the commercial dehydration system since March 2008. Recently the demonstration experiment is conducted to verify the dehydration performance of Hitz membrane element in the commercial petrochemical manufacturing process.
