Rapid Screening of Vapor Uptake by Ultra-Thin Polymer Films Using Surface Plasmon Resonance and Quartz Crystal Microbalance with Dissipation Monitoring

Abstract

Volatile emissions can be efficiently reduced by membrane separation processes. Selecting the most adequate membrane polymer can be a time and resource-intensive screening process. It is demonstrated that surface-sensitive techniques such as the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) can be valuable tools to significantly cut down on the time needed to characterize and quantify vapor-polymer interactions. Both techniques are shown to be highly complementary. QCM allows also obtaining qualitative data on changes in the polymer viscoelasticity upon vapor sorption which ultimately might permit a correlation with the mechanical membrane stability.