Integration of ordered porous materials for targeted three-component gas separation.

Jiang, Xue; Wang, Yu; Wang, Hui; Cheng, Lu; Cao, Jian-Wei; Wang, Jin-Bo; Yang, Rong; Zhang, Dong-Hui; Zhang, Run-Ye; Yang, Xiu-Bo; Wang, Su-Hang; Zhang, Qiu-Yu; Chen, Kai-Jie

Separation of multi-component mixtures in an energy-efficient manner has important practical impact in chemical industry but is highly challenging. Especially, targeted simultaneous removal of multiple impurities to purify the desired product in one-step separation process is an extremely difficult task. We introduced a pore integration strategy of modularizing ordered pore structures with specific functions for on-demand assembly to deal with complex multi-component separation systems, which are unattainable by each individual pore. As a proof of concept, two ultramicroporous nanocrystals (one for C2H2-selective and the other for CO2-selective) as the shell pores were respectively grown on a C2H6-selective ordered porous material as the core pore. Both of the respective pore-integrated materials show excellent one-step ethylene production performance in dynamic breakthrough separation experiments of C2H2/C2H4/C2H6 and CO2/C2H4/C2H6 gas mixture, and even better than that from traditional tandem-packing processes originated from the optimized mass/heat transfer. Thermodynamic and dynamic simulation results explained that the pre-designed pore modules can perform specific target functions independently in the pore-integrated materials.Separation of multi-component mixtures is an extremely difficult task. Pore integration strategy offers an approach for assembling ordered pores with specific functions on demand to achieve the one-step separation of multi-component complex mixtures.

Nature Communications, 2025, Vol 16, Issue 1, p1

2041-1723

Academic Journal

10.1038/s41467-025-55991-y