NATURAL GAS SEPARATION VIA GRAPHENE NANO LAYER; MD SIMULATION APPROACH

Separation of natural gas content is one of the great issues that attracted the attention ofscientist. More specifically, separating the isotopic contents of the natural gas is necessarydue to its great application in industry and medicine. Molecular permeation of gases throughnanoporous graphene membranes is reported as one of the suitable techniques for theseparation process. Recently molecular dynamics simulations are used to explore themysteries lied behind the molecular permeation in different literature.Graphene is a two-dimensional sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms, which has suitablechemical stability, excellent thermal conductance, good mechanical strength, and remarkableelectronic properties. Although a perfect graphene sheet - without defects- is impermeable togases, nanoporous graphene, a graphene sheet featuring nano pores, is proposed as a sizeselectivegas separation membrane. Computational simulations and experiments suggest thatnanoporous graphene can exhibit high permeance and selectivity. According to literature,simulation of graphene membrane with functionalized pores showed that gas flow throughthe pores increase significantly and one can calculate the flux of the passing atoms. Here , wepresent our studies about the gas permeation through a nano pore graphene, withoutfunctionalization.