Acetylene and propylene are the most important raw material in the chemical industry. The purification of these chemicals is the crucial process for obtaining feedstocks for downstream chemical production, which employs energy-intensive cryogenic distillation technologies. It remains a great challenge due to the similarity of these two gases in physiochemical properties. Exploring porous materials for selective adsorptive separation of acetylene from carbon dioxide and propylene from propane is a feasible and efficient way to replace the decade-old thermal separations. By rational design of the ultramicroporous environment, namely the pore size and pore surface, highly selective molecular recognition can be achieved to realize molecular discrimination and separations. We report highly efficient electrostatically driven CO2/C2H2 separation in an ultramicroporous cadmium nitroprusside (Cd-NP) with compact pore space and complementary electrostatic potential well-fitting for CO2, thus enabling molecular quadrupole moment recognition of CO2 over C2H2. Another nitroprusside-based compound, nickel nitroprusside (Ni-NP), with open metal sites (OMS) for the highly efficient separation of propylene from propane under ambient conditions is reported. This material exhibits high C3H6/C3H8 selectivity of 10.5 and an uptake ratio of 1.68, with a remarkable C3H6 uptake capacity.

Nitroprusside based ultramicroporous materials for gas molecule recognition and separation

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ACS Fall 2022

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