Energy efficient gas separation is desired for various industrial applications, including hydrogen fuel production, natural gas sweetening and carbon dioxide capture (from flue gas) etc. Membrane gas separation, as a pressure-driven process, is of particular interest because it does not have the energy intensive phase-transition process that exists in the conventional cryogenic distillation process or adsorption processes. The ultimate challenge of membrane gas separation is to achieve high flux and high selectivity simultaneously. Supported 2D materials, including metal organic framework (MOF) nanosheets, graphene and graphene oxides (GOs) atomic sheets, have demonstrated great promise toward this challenge. However, their fabrication process generally requires multiple steps and is difficult to scale up to large and flexible substrates. Here we report, a facile, one-step, scalable process in which initiated plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (iPECVD) ultra-thin (<i>i.e.</i> sub-100 nm) and flexible metal organic covalent network (MOCN) layers are synthesized directly on a membrane support of 175 cm<sup>2</sup> area. Tetraphenylporphyrin building units (with or without centering metal ions) were employed to form covalently bonded ultra-thin films for the first time, such films achieved gas separation exceeding upper bounds for multiple gas pairs.

Ultrathin CVD-deposited metal-organic covalent network for gas separation

251st National Meeting (2016)

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