Science · Nature Materials, 2018
From frameworks to membranes
The sieving of a MOF, carried into a membrane.
The question
Can the molecular sieving of a MOF survive the move into a membrane that can actually be made?
What was done
Submicrometre fcu-MOF crystals, engineered so that the linkers delimiting the triangular window (the sole entrance to the pore) are precisely controlled, were incorporated into polymers to form mixed-matrix membranes.
What the paper reports
The membranes showed enhanced separation performance for two demanding problems: removing CO2 and H2S from natural gas, and separating butane isomers. Their sieving behavior showed that the deliberately contracted pore aperture can discriminate between molecular pairs.
What remains open
Adhesion between crystal and polymer, long-term stability and scale-up of defect-free membranes. Laboratory permeation data are not an operating plant.
- Paper
- Liu, G.; Chernikova, V.; Liu, Y.; Zhang, K.; Belmabkhout, Y.; Shekhah, O.; Zhang, C.; Yi, S.; Eddaoudi, M.; Koros, W. J. Mixed matrix formulations with MOF molecular sieving for key energy-intensive separations. Nature Materials 17, 283–289 (2018).
- Credited
- Gongping Liu, Valeriya Chernikova, Yang Liu, Kuang Zhang, Youssef Belmabkhout, Osama Shekhah, Chen Zhang, Sunghwan Yi, Mohamed Eddaoudi and William J. Koros.
- Link
- doi.org/10.1038/s41563-017-0013-1