Hydrophobicity regulation by a facial bromine substitution in MIL-47(V) for highly selective adsorptive desulfurization

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have shown promising adsorptive desulfurization (ADS) capacity yet remains great challenges to maintain excellent performance in presence of water. Guided by the density function theoretical (DFT) calculations, we select bromine modified linkers with different substitution degrees to construct MIL-47-xBr to regulate the porosity and hydrophobicity. The optimized MIL-47-Br exhibits the highest saturation dibenzothiophene (DBT) capacity of 179.2 mgS g −1 from the hydrous oil, surpassing the record of all ADS adsorbents. Meanwhile, the excellent selectivity, adsorption kinetics, and recycle stability endow MIL-47-Br with superior ADS performance from the commercial hydrous gasoline. With the DBT capacity decreases by only 12.3% from the commercial gasoline, a continue flow ADS is successfully achieved on the fixed-bed of MIL-47-Br column. Therefore, this facial strategy of simple substitution can fully exploit the functions of open metal sites for enhancing the task-specific selectivity, and has a promising application prospect in industrial ADS.