Integration of ordered porous materials for targeted three-component gas separation
Xue Jiang, Yu Wang, Wang Hui, Chang Lu, Jianwei Cao, Jinbo Wang, Rong Yang, Donghui Zhang, Runye Zhang, Xiubo Yang, Shihao Wang, Qiuyu Zhang, Kai‐Jie Chen
Abstract
Separation of multi-component mixtures in an energy-efficient manner has important practical impact in chemical industry but is highly challenging. Especially, targeted simultaneous removal of multiple impurities to purify the desired product in one-step separation process is an extremely difficult task. We introduced a pore integration strategy of modularizing ordered pore structures with specific functions for on-demand assembly to deal with complex multi-component separation systems, which are unattainable by each individual pore. As a proof of concept, two ultramicroporous nanocrystals (one for C2H2-selective and the other for CO2-selective) as the shell pores were respectively grown on a C2H6-selective ordered porous material as the core pore. Both of the respective pore-integrated materials show excellent one-step ethylene production performance in dynamic breakthrough separation experiments of C2H2/C2H4/C2H6 and CO2/C2H4/C2H6 gas mixture, and even better than that from traditional tandem-packing processes originated from the optimized mass/heat transfer. Thermodynamic and dynamic simulation results explained that the pre-designed pore modules can perform specific target functions independently in the pore-integrated materials. Separation of multi-component mixtures is an extremely difficult task. Pore integration strategy offers an approach for assembling ordered pores with specific functions on demand to achieve the one-step separation of multi-component complex mixtures.