121st General Meeting of the KCS

Type Oral Presentation
Area Oral Presentation for 2018 DOW Chemical Korea Award
Room No. Room 202A
Time THU 10:39-:
Code KCS.O-4
Subject Exploiting Diffusion Barrier and Chemical Affinity of Metal-Organic Frameworks for Efficient Hydrogen Isotope Separation
Authors Jin Yeong Kim, Rafael Balderas-Xicohtenécatl1, Linda Zhang1, Sung Gu Kang2, Michael Hirscher1,*, Hyunchul Oh3,*, Hoi Ri Moon*
Department of Chemistry, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
1Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany
2School of Chemical Engineering, University of Ulsan, Korea
3Department of Energy Engineering, Gyeongnam National University of Science and Technology (GNTECH), Korea
Abstract Deuterium plays a pivotal role in industrial and scientific research, and is irreplaceable for various applications such as isotope tracing, neutron moderation, and neutron scattering. In addition, deuterium is a key energy source for fusion reactions. Thus, the isolation of deuterium from physico-chemically almost identical isotopic mixture is a seminal challenge in modern separation technology. However, current commercial approaches suffer from extremely low separation efficiency (i.e. cryogenic distillation, selectivity of 1.5 at 24 K), requiring a cost-effective and large-scale separation technique. In this presentation, we present a highly effective hydrogen isotope separation system based on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) having the highest reported separation factor as high as ~26 at 77 K by maximizing synergistic effects of the chemical affinity quantum sieving (CAQS) and kinetic quantum sieving (KQS). For this purpose, MOF-74 system having high hydrogen adsorption enthalpies due to strong open metal sites is chosen for CAQS functionality and imidazole molecules (IM) are employed to the system for enhancing the KQS effect. To the best of our knowledge, this work is not only the first attempt to implement two quantum sieving effects, KQS and CAQS, in one system but also provides experimental validation of the utility of this system for practical industrial usage by isolating high-purity D2 through direct selective separation studies using 1:1 D2/H2 mixtures.
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