Rapid and easily scalable solvothermal synthesis of functionalized UiO-66 for selective separation of CO2 and N2

A rapid and easily scalable solvothermal method is developed to synthesize UiO-66 with different functional groups. • UiO-66-NH 2 exhibits excellent CO 2 /N 2 separation performance. • UiO-66-NH 2 significantly enhances the adsorption interaction with CO 2 . • This solvothermal method exhibits good scalability and performance reproducibility. UiO-66 is one of the most promising metal-organic framework (MOF) materials for CO 2 adsorption due to its high specific surface area, high stability, and ease of functionalization. However, its synthesis methods often suffer from problems such as long reaction times, uneven mass and heat transfer, and limitations in equipment size. Here, we develop a rapid and easily scalable solvothermal method to prepare UiO-66 with different functional groups, denoted as UiO-66-x (x = H, NH 2 , NO 2 , F, CH 3 ), for the selective separation of CO 2 and N 2 . Adsorption experiments show that UiO-66-NH 2 exhibits excellent adsorption performance for CO 2 , reaching an adsorption capacity of 76.71 cm 3 /g at 273 K and 0.1 MPa, which is superior to some reported solid adsorbents. Dynamic breakthrough experiments show that UiO-66-NH 2 has excellent separation performance for CO 2 and N 2 under practical conditions. More importantly, UiO-66-NH 2 exhibits good reusability after 10 consecutive adsorption-desorption cycles. Theoretical calculations indicate that the introduction of amino groups enhances the adsorption interaction of UiO-66-NH 2 with CO 2 , thereby improving its selective adsorption capacity. Furthermore, the UiO-66-NH 2 prepared in gram-scale experiments exhibits high consistency with the milligram-scale samples in terms of crystal structure and CO 2 adsorption performance, indicating that this method has good scalability and performance reproducibility. Download: Download high-res image (247KB) Download: Download full-size image