Oregon State University scientists have found a way to more than double the uptake ability of a chemical structure that can be used for scrubbing carbon dioxide from factory flues.
The study involving metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, is important because industrial activities, among them burning fossil fuels for energy, account for a significant percentage of the greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. In the United States, 16% of total carbon dioxide emissions are from industry, according to the Environmental Protection Agency(Link is external).
OSU researchers led by Kyriakos Stylianou of the College of Science worked with a copper-based MOF and found that its effectiveness at adsorbing carbon dioxide more than doubled when first exposed to ammonia gas.
“The capture of CO2 is critical for meeting net-zero emission targets,” said Stylianou, associate professor of chemistry. “MOFs have shown a lot of promise because of their porosity and their structural versatility.”
MOFs are crystalline materials made up of positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic “linker” molecules known as ligands. The metal ions make nodes that bind the linkers’ arms to form a repeating structure that looks something like a cage; the structure has nanosized pores that adsorb gases, similar to a sponge.
MOFs can be designed with a variety of components, which determine the MOF’s properties, and there are millions of possible MOFs, Stylianou said. More than 100,000 of them have been synthesized by chemistry researchers, and the properties of hundreds of thousands of others have been predicted.
In addition to the capture of carbon dioxide and other types of gases, MOFs can be used as catalysts and for energy storage, drug delivery and water purification.
Read the full article on OSU's newsroom.
