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Title: Data-driven design of metal–organic frameworks for wet flue gas CO2 capture

Journal Article · · Nature (London)
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [1];  [3];  [4];  [1];  [5];  [1];  [2];  [4];  [6];  [3];  [2];  [1];  [1]
  1. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Sion (Switzerland). Lab. of Molecular Simulation (LSMO), Inst. des Sciences et Ingénierie Chimiques, Valais (ISIC)
  2. Heriot-Watt Univ., Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
  3. Univ. of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON (Canada)
  4. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
  5. Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (Switzlerland). Inst. des Sciences et Ingénierie Chimiques (ISIC)
  6. Univ. de Granada, Granada (Spain)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Limiting the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is one of the largest challenges of our generation. Because carbon capture and storage is one of the few viable technologies that can mitigate current CO2 emissions, much effort is focused on developing solid adsorbents that can efficiently capture CO2 from flue gases emitted from anthropogenic sources. One class of materials that has attracted considerable interest in this context is metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), in which the careful combination of organic ligands with metal-ion nodes can, in principle, give rise to innumerable structurally and chemically distinct nanoporous MOFs. However, many MOFs that are optimized for the separation of CO2 from nitrogen do not perform well when using realistic flue gas that contains water, because water competes with CO2 for the same adsorption sites and thereby causes the materials to lose their selectivity. Although flue gases can be dried, this renders the capture process prohibitively expensive. Here we show that data mining of a computational screening library of over 300,000 MOFs can identify different classes of strong CO2-binding sites-which we term 'adsorbaphores'-that endow MOFs with CO2/N2 selectivity that persists in wet flue gases. We subsequently synthesized two water-stable MOFs containing the most hydrophobic adsorbaphore, and found that their carbon-capture performance is not affected by water and outperforms that of some commercial materials. Testing the performance of these MOFs in an industrial setting and consideration of the full capture process-including the targeted CO2 sink, such as geological storage or serving as a carbon source for the chemical industry-will be necessary to identify the optimal separation material.

Research Organization:
Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) (United States). Center for Gas Separations Relevant to Clean Energy Technologies (CGS); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); European Research Council (ERC); European Union (EU); Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation of Spain (MINECO); Office Fédéral de l'Energie (Switzerland)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231; SC0001015
OSTI ID:
1605262
Journal Information:
Nature (London), Vol. 576, Issue 7786; ISSN 0028-0836
Publisher:
Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 256 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (3)

Screening for selectivity journal December 2019
Three metal–organic framework isomers of different pore sizes for selective CO 2 adsorption and isomerization studies journal January 2020
Large-Scale Screening and Machine Learning to Predict the Computation-Ready, Experimental Metal-Organic Frameworks for CO2 Capture from Air journal January 2020

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