This paper reports a new polyimide design with high internal free volume elements for fast mass transport simultaneously with high selectivity. Here, we show that the polymer design using a three-dimensional rigid molecular structure having internal void space can lead to the formation of high fractional free volume with proper cavity size to separate small gas molecules with high selectivities as high permeabilities. These findings could strongly impact emerging gas separation applications using polymeric membranes such as natural gas purification and biogas purification to get clean energy resources.

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