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To our wives, Diana and Live, and our children, Abigail, Ariel, Avital, Daniel and Emil, who wondered what we did all this time.
Preface
This textbook tells the story of ceramic membranes. Ceramics are making a comeback as hi-tech materials, and the membranes are used in many processes, from uranium purification to orange juice finishing. Moreover, they can help us address urgent environmental issues air pollution and shortage of clean drinking water. It is definitely the time to study them.
The book is divided into five thematic chapters. Chapter 1 gives a general introduction to the membrane field and then covers the making of ceramic membranes. The physics of flow models and mass transfer through membranes are discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 deals with membrane characterization, from the most common methods to the state-of-the-art. We then move to applications in Chapter 4, containing a range of industrial sectors, including chemicals, food and beverages and fuel cells. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at ceramic membranes from a different viewpoint: We examine the economics of membrane manufacturing and predict, on the basis of case studies, the future market for ceramic membrane technologies.
We wrote this book for both researchers and students. Thus, each chapter includes detailed references, as well as exercises. To help you master the membrane jargon, key terms are printed in italics and defined the first time they appear in the text. The book contains over 1000 references, whereof >90% are original papers in peer-reviewed journals. We cite reviews when introducing a subject, and articles when discussing specific topics (plus some patents in the industrial examples). Chapter 1 also contains a “Further Reading” list of books on related specialized subjects.
We thank our families for their patience and support during the past 3 years, and our colleagues Vittorio Boffa, Hessel Castricum, David Dubbeldam, Andre ten Elshof, Giovanni Catania, David Farrusseng, Slava Freger, Freek Kapteijn, Chiho Kojima, Erik Kossin, Daniel Sereth Larsen, Marc Pera-Titus, Ehsan Salehi, Jesus Santamaría, Lev Tsapovski, Ning Yan and Gennady Ziskind for their help and advice. V.G. thanks Rabbi Daniel Lewenstein for his support and encouragement. We also thank Itamar Daube for drawing the cover picture and Wiley-VCH editors Waltraud Wüst and Gudrun Walter for their encouraging and professional attitude.