Metal–organic framework (MOF) membranes have enormous potential in separation applications. There are several MOF membranes grown on polymer substrates aimed for scale-up, but their brittleness hampers any industrial application. Herein, intergrown continuous polypropylene (PP)-supported ZIF-8 membranes have been successfully synthesized via fast current-driven synthesis (FCDS) within 1 h. The PP-supported ZIF-8 membranes exhibit a promising separation factor of 122 ± 13 for binary C3H6–C3H8 mixtures combined with excellent flexibility behavior. The C3H6/C3H8 separation performance of the PP-supported ZIF-8 membrane was found to be constant after bending the supported ZIF-8 film with a curvature of 92 m–1. This outstanding mechanical property is crucial for practical applications. Moreover, we further synthesized ZIF-8 membranes on various polymer substrates and even polymer hollow fibers to demonstrate the production scalability.

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Dedicated to Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Ju ¨rgen Caro on the occasion of his 70th birthday Supporting Information available onlineMetal-organic frameworks (MOFs) show great potential for adsorption separation. However, MOFs' flexibility may influence their adsorption behaviors. Here, for the first time we prepare ZIF-8 powder dominated with stiffened ZIF-8_Cm phase under an external E-field. By comparison, we find that the flexibility of ZIF-8 has little influence in equilibriumbased separation behavior for C 3 H 6 /C 3 H 8 . However, the stiffened ZIF-8 formed in E-field presents an obviously decreased diffusion rate for C 3 H 8 , whose C 3 H 6 /C 3 H 8 kinetic-based separation factor is around 2.5 times higher than that of the traditional ZIF-8 powder.