Pore Space Partition within a Metal-Organic Framework for Highly Efficient CH/CO Separation.

The pore space partition (PSP) approach has been employed to realize a novel porous MOF (FJU-90) with dual functionalities for the challenging CH/CO separation under ambient conditions. By virtue of a triangular ligand (Tripp = 2,4,6-tris(4-pyridyl)pyridine), the cylindrical channels in the original FJU-88 have been partitioned into uniformly interconnected pore cavities, leading to the dramatically reduced pore apertures from 12.0 × 9.4 to 5.4 × 5.1 Å. Narrowing down the pore sizes, the resulting activated FJU-90a takes up a very large amount of CH (180 cm g) but much less of CO (103 cm g) at 298 K and 1 bar, demonstrating it to be the best porous MOF material for this CH/CO (50%:50%) separation in terms of the CH gravimetric productivity. IAST calculations, molecular modeling studies, and simulated and experimental breakthrough experiments comprehensively demonstrate that the pore space partition strategy is a very powerful approach to constructing MOFs with dual functionality for challenging gas separation.