Metal-organic and zeolite imidazolate frameworks (MOFs and ZIFs) for highly selective separations

Metal-organic and zeolite imidazolate frameworks (MOFs and ZIFs) have been investigated for the realization as separation media with high selectivity. These structures are held together with strong bonds, making them architecturally, chemically, and thermally stable. Therefore, employing well designed building units, it is possible to discover promising materials for gas and vapor separation. This grant was focused on the study of MOFs and ZIFs with these specific objectives: (i) to develop a strategy for producing MOFs and ZIFs that combine high surface areas with active sites for their use in gas adsorption and separation of small organic compounds, (ii) to introduce active sites in the framework by a post-synthetic modification and metalation of MOFs and ZIFs, and (iii) to design and synthesize MOFs with extremely high surface areas and large pore volumes to accommodate large amounts of guest molecules. By the systematic study, this effort demonstrated how to introduce active functional groups in the frameworks, and this is also the origin of a new strategy, which is termed isoreticular functionalization and metalation. However, a large pore volume is still a prerequisite feature. One of the solutions to overcome this challenge is an isoreticular expansion of a MOF’s structure. With triangular organic linker and square building units, we demonstrated that MOF-399 has a unit cell volume 17 times larger than that of the first reported material isoreticular to it, and it has the highest porosity (94%) and lowest density (0.126 g cm-3) of any MOF reported to date. MOFs are not just low density materials; the guest-free form of MOF-210 demonstrates an ultrahigh porosity, whose BET surface area was estimated to be 6240 m2 g-1 by N2 adsorption measurements