Development and Evaluation of Porous Materials for Carbon Dioxide Separation and Capture

TLDR

The rapid development of microporous materials, especially metal‑organic frameworks, is driven by their potential for carbon capture, natural‑gas purification, and flue‑gas CO₂ separation. We aim to rapidly evaluate a large set of MOFs for practical CO₂ separation applications. We applied five established adsorbent‑evaluation criteria to over 40 MOFs, assessing their suitability for CO₂ separation in natural‑gas purification, landfill‑gas separation, and power‑plant flue‑gas capture. The analysis revealed relationships between MOF properties and CO₂ separation performance, and compared their potential to zeolites, highlighting promising materials for each application.

Abstract

Abstract The development of new microporous materials for adsorption separation processes is a rapidly growing field because of potential applications such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and purification of clean‐burning natural gas. In particular, new metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs) and other porous coordination polymers are being generated at a rapid and growing pace. Herein, we address the question of how this large number of materials can be quickly evaluated for their practical application in carbon dioxide separation processes. Five adsorbent evaluation criteria from the chemical engineering literature are described and used to assess over 40 MOFs for their potential in CO 2 separation processes for natural gas purification, landfill gas separation, and capture of CO 2 from power‐plant flue gas. Comparisons with other materials such as zeolites are made, and the relationships between MOF properties and CO 2 separation potential are investigated from the large data set. In addition, strategies for tailoring and designing MOFs to enhance CO 2 adsorption are briefly reviewed.