Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 11, 2025
Author Spotlight: Characterizing Porous Materials for Aiding the Development of Robust Metal-Organic Frameworks with Adsorption Behavior
Published on: March 8, 2024
Spatial Distribution of Nitrogen Binding Sites in Metal-Organic Frameworks for Selective Ethane Adsorption and
Changhua Song1, Fang Zheng1,2, Ying Liu1
1Key Laboratory of Biomass Chemical Engineering of the Ministry of Education, College of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, 310058, P. R. China.
Abstract:
The one-step purification of ethylene (C2 H4 ) from mixtures containing ethane (C2 H6 ) and acetylene (C2 H2 ) is an industrially important yet challenging process. In this work, we present a site-engineering strategy aimed at manipulating the spatial distribution of binding sites within a confined pore space. We realized successfully by incorporating nitrogen-containing heterocycles, such as indole-5-carboxylic acid (Ind), benzimidazole-5-carboxylic acid (Bzz), and indazole-5-carboxylic acid (Izo), into the robust MOF-808 platform via post-synthetic modification. The resulting functionalized materials, namely MOF-808-Ind, MOF-808-Bzz, and MOF-808-Izo, demonstrated significantly improved selectivity for C2 H2 and C2 H6 over C2 H4 . MOF-808-Bzz with two uniformly distributed nitrogen binding sites gave the optimal geometry for selective ethane trapping through multiple strong C-H⋅⋅⋅N hydrogen bonds, leading to the highest C2 H2 /C2 H4 and C2 H6 /C2 H4 combined selectivities among known MOFs. Column breakthrough experiments validated its ability to purify C2 H4 from ternary C2 H2 /C2 H4 /C2 H6 mixtures in a single step.
