4.4 Challenges and perspectives

Though the solar membrane reactor has lots of advantages and immense potential for application mentioned above, the efficient approach to lower the partial pressure of gas product (or avoid the relatively low pressure) is the main challenge to maintain a high energy conversion rate, and the improvement of stability and permeability of membrane material at corresponding reaction temperature is also significant. These issues have potential areas for big breakthroughs and require further studies to address. The multiple product separation with membrane reactor may be a promising method to increase the energy efficiency, due to a relatively high partial pressure and less separation energy required [71].
