Ligand Circuit Concept for Developing Gas Separation Materials from Pore-Space-Partitioned Metal-Organic Frameworks

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Chemistry
• Nanotechnology

Background:

• Isoreticular chemistry is crucial for designing materials with tunable pore characteristics.
• Expanding ligand families and establishing correlations are vital for predictive synthetic design in materials science.
• A need exists for systematic approaches to guide ligand expansion in isoreticular chemistry.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and demonstrate the utility of the 'ligand circuit' concept for designing novel porous materials.
• To synthesize and characterize a new family of pore-space-partitioned materials using an acyclic ligand.
• To evaluate the gas sorption and separation properties of the newly developed materials.

Main Methods:

• Proposal and application of the 'ligand circuit' concept.
• Synthesis of porous materials using trans, trans-muconic acid (an acyclic ligand).
• Characterization of material stability, pore geometry, and gas sorption/separation performance.
• Multi-cycle breakthrough experiments for assessing separation efficiency.

Main Results:

• Successful synthesis of highly stable, high-performance pore-space-partitioned materials from an acyclic ligand.
• Demonstrated high gas uptake capacities: CPM-7.3a-NiV shows high CO2 (81.3 cm3 g-1) and C2H2 (165.4 cm3 g-1) uptake.
• CPM-7.3a-CoV exhibits selective C2H6/C2H4 separation with high uptakes (C2H4: 134.0 cm3 g-1, C2H6: 148.0 cm3 g-1) and a separation potential of 1.35 mmol g-1.
• Breakthrough experiments confirmed promising C2H2/CO2 separation performance.

Conclusions:

• The 'ligand circuit' concept is a powerful tool for designing advanced porous materials from acyclic ligands.
• The synthesized materials exhibit excellent gas sorption and selective separation properties, particularly for C2H2/CO2 and C2H6/C2H4.
• This work represents a significant advancement in creating highly porous and stable materials using acyclic building blocks.