Molecular Sieving of Acetylene from Ethylene in a Rigid Ultra‐microporous Metal Organic Framework.
Xue Jiang, Tony Pham, Jianwei Cao, Katherine A. Forrest, Hui Wang, Juan Chen, Qiu‐Yu Zhang, Kai‐Jie Chen
Abstract
Abstract Rigid molecular sieving materials are the ideal candidates for gas separation (e. g., C 2 H 2 /C 2 H 4 ) due to their ultrahigh adsorption selectivity and the absence of gas co‐adsorption. However, the absolute molecular sieving effect for C 2 H 2 /C 2 H 4 separation has rarely been realized because of their similar physicochemical properties. Herein, we demonstrate the absolute molecular sieving of C 2 H 2 from C 2 H 4 by a rigid ultra‐microporous metal‐organic framework ( F−PYMO−Cu ) with 1D regular channels (pore size of ca. 3.4 Å). F−PYMO−Cu exhibited moderate acetylene uptake (35.5 cm 3 /cm 3 ), but very low ethylene uptake (0.55 cm 3 /cm 3 ) at 298 K and 1 bar, yielding the second highest C 2 H 2 /C 2 H 4 uptake ratio of 63.6 up to now. One‐step C 2 H 4 production from a binary mixture of C 2 H 2 /C 2 H 4 and a ternary mixture of C 2 H 2 /CO 2 /C 2 H 4 at 298 K was achieved and verified by dynamic breakthrough experiments. Coupled with excellent thermal and water stability, F−PYMO−Cu could be a promising candidate for industrial C 2 separation tasks.