Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are excellent materials for storing carbon dioxide, so could be useful for removing carbon dioxide from flue gas stacks. However, their performance in industrially relevant swing adsorption processes for carbon capture has not been studied – until now.
US scientists have shown that the efficacy of MOFs for carbon capture depends dramatically on the process and that some MOFs can provide significant carbon capture under typical pressure and vacuum swing processes. In particular, they say, MOFs that possess coordinatively unsaturated metal centres offer as much as 9 mmol g-1 swing capacity under certain conditions.
They conclude that there is no single ideal compound for carbon capture applications and different materials can perform better or worse depending on the specific process conditions.
In addition to the MOFs’ capture performances, the team also investigated their selectivity to carbon dioxide over that of nitrogen and methane. The analysis demonstrates that the performance of a given MOF cannot be determined without also considering the detailed industrial process in which the MOF is to be applied, they say.
Read the Energy & Environmental Science article:
J M Simmons, H Wu, W Zhou and T Yildirim, Energy Environ. Sci., 2011
DOI: 10.1039/c0ee00700e
