Tang YC, Wang ZS, Yi H, Zhou MY, Zhou DD, Zhang JP, Chen XM. Water-Stable Metal Azolate Frameworks Showing Interesting Flexibilities for Highly Effective Bioethanol Dehydration.
Angew Chem Int Ed Engl 2023:e202303374. [PMID:
37040094 DOI:
10.1002/anie.202303374]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/07/2023] [Revised: 04/08/2023] [Accepted: 04/11/2023] [Indexed: 04/12/2023]
Abstract
The ethanol/water separation challenge highlights the adsorption capacity/selectivity trade-off problem. We show that the target guest can serve as a gating component of the host to block the undesired guest, giving molecular sieving effect for the adsorbent possessing large pores. Two hydrophilic/water-stable metal azolate frameworks were designed to compare the effects of gating and pore-opening flexibility. Large amounts (up to 28.7 mmol g-1) of ethanol with fuel-grade (99.5%+) and even higher purities (99.9999%+) can be produced in a single adsorption process from not only 95:5 but also 10:90 ethanol/water mixtures. More interestingly, the pore-opening adsorbent possessing large pore apertures showed not only high water adsorption capacity but also exceptionally high water/ethanol selectivity characteristic of molecular sieving. Computational simulations demonstrated the critical role of guest-anchoring aperture for the guest-dominated gating process.
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