Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.141, No.9, 4130-4136, 2019
Pore Space Partition within a Metal-Organic Framework for Highly Efficient C2H2/CO2 Separation
The pore space partition (PSP) approach has been employed to realize a novel porous MOF (FJU-90) with dual functionalities for the challenging C2H2/CO2 separation under ambient conditions. By virtue of a triangular ligand (Tripp = 2,4,6-tris(4-pyridyl)pyridine), the cylindrical channels in the original FJU-88 have been partitioned into uniformly interconnected pore cavities, leading to the dramatically reduced pore apertures from 12.0 X 9.4 to 5.4 X 5.1 angstrom(2). Narrowing down the pore sizes, the resulting activated FJU-90a takes up a very large amount of C2H2 (180 cm(3) g(-1)) but much less of CO2 (103 cm(3) g(-1)) at 298 K and 1 bar, demonstrating it to be the best porous MOF material for this C2H2/CO2 (50%:50%) separation in terms of the C2H2 gravimetric productivity. IAST calculations, molecular modeling studies, and simulated and experimental breakthrough experiments comprehensively demonstrate that the pore space partition strategy is a very powerful approach to constructing MOFs with dual functionality for challenging gas separation.