Global temperatures continue to rise at a record pace, largely due to increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, so it is becoming more and more imperative to find a low cost, space efficient method to separate CO2 from a mostly N2 atmosphere. Additionally, CO2 is a common impurity in industrial acetylene, but the reactive nature of acetylene makes purification hazardous. Over the last decade, there has been increased effort to design metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) geared toward the application of global warming mediation and industrial gas purification. Given the aventageousness of phosphine based frameworks, this research project aimed to design an acetylenic-type phosphine coordination material targeted to separate CO2 from acetylene and N2. A novel acetylenic phosphine ligand, tris(4-carboxyphenylethynyl)phosphine, was used to make a Mn(II) framework that was characterized by BET. It is shown to exhibit high room temperature separation selectivity for C2H2/CH4, C2H2/CO2, CO2/N2, and the free phosphine opens potentials for pre- and post- synthetic modification. The high separation selectivity of C2H2/CO2 and CO2/N2 leads this framework to be a strong candidate for the proposed applications, and the success of this project has spurred a further investigation of acetylenic phosphine ligands to create various other frameworks.

High room temperature separation of CO2 vs. C2H2 and N2 in Mn(II) acetylenic phosphine-based metal organic framework

255th National Meeting (2018)

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