Abstract The production process of slurry polyethylene technology still suffers from the dewaxing problem from a large amount of organic solvents. At present, the common dewaxing method is steam heating of n-hexane after the solid-liquid separation by centrifugation. However, it causes great energy consumption. Here, we proposed a membrane separation technique for solvent dewaxing in slurry polyethylene technology, and then the feasibility of this technique was confirmed based on theoretical and experiment demonstrations. Experimental results demonstrated that domestic polyamide (PA) composite membrane and polyethersulfone (PES) membrane achieved high rejection of 95.8% and 96.4% for paraffin, respectively. Meanwhile, their solvent fluxes reached 18.6 and 16.3 L/(m2·h), respectively. Moreover, the excellent long-term operational stability and cleaning resistance ability further ensured the practical application of membrane separation technology in solvent dewaxing of slurry polyethylene technology.
