Xenon Gas Separation and Storage Using Metal-Organic Frameworks

Abstract

The global demand for Xenon (Xe), a noble gas with applications in electronics, lighting, and the medical industry, is expected to increase significantly over the coming decades. However, the low abundance of Xe in the Earth's atmosphere and the costly cryogenic distillation process that is used to obtain Xe commercially via air separation have limited the scale of applications of Xe. A physisorption-based separation using porous materials could be a viable and cost-effective alternative to cryogenic distillation. In particular, metalorganic frameworks (MOFs) have shown promise as highly Xe-selective porous solids. In this review, we discuss the recent advances of MOFs as adsorbents for noble gas adsorption and separation and the role of computer simulation in finding optimal materials for Xe adsorption.

Robust Microporous Metal–Organic Frameworks for Highly Efficient and Simultaneous Removal of Propyne and Propadiene from Propylene

“…monotonous structure, lack of specific binding sites) owing to their well‐defined structure, fine‐tunable pore size, and custom‐designed functional groups . Much effort has been devoted to the use of MOFs for the separation of binary gas mixtures, such as acetylene/ethylene, ethylene/ethane, carbon dioxide/methane, carbon dioxide/nitrogen, acetylene/carbon dioxide, krypton/xenon, propyne/propylene, and propylene/propane . However, the simultaneous removal of propyne and propadiene from propylene using MOFs as absorbents is still underexplored .…”

Computational Exploration of IRMOFs for Xenon Separation from Air

“…37−42 For instance, Anderson et al recently published an interesting paper 43 on the application of molecular simulations to the membrane-based Kr/Xe separation, where they quantified the effect of temperature on the separation process and revealed that a lower temperature improves the Kr/Xe separation performance of studied membranes. Thallapally and his co-workers recently published a comprehensive review paper 29 that covers nearly all related publications dealing with this issue. However, another alternative resource for xenon can be xenon/air mixture, which could be very beneficial from both the economic and energy sustainability point of view.…”

Robust Microporous Metal–Organic Frameworks for Highly Efficient and Simultaneous Removal of Propyne and Propadiene from Propylene

“…However, the use of traditional porous materials,s uch as zeolites, [5,6] and activated carbon [7] to separate ternary propyne/propadiene/ propylene gas mixtures has not been realized yet, possibly because of the similar physical properties,s tructure,a nd molecular sizes of propyne,p ropadiene,a nd propylene (Scheme 1). [9][10][11][12][13] Much effort has been devoted to the use of MOFs for the separation of binary gas mixtures, such as acetylene/ethylene, [14][15][16][17][18][19] ethylene/ethane, [14,[20][21][22] carbon dioxide/methane, [23,24] carbon dioxide/nitrogen, [25,26] acetylene/carbon dioxide, [27,28] krypton/xenon, [29] propyne/ propylene, [30,31] and propylene/propane. monotonous structure,l ack of specific binding sites) owing to their welldefined structure,f ine-tunable pore size,a nd customdesigned functional groups.…”