Rapid solvothermal synthesis of microporous UiO-66 particles for carbon dioxide capture

Abstract

One of the important metal-organic frameworks known as UiO-66 has received significant attention recently due to its unprecedented chemical and thermal stability, with exceptionally high surface area. We prepared UiO-66 particles by a rapid solvothermal method which took only 30 min at 120 °C to prepare, compared to the previous work which took longer than 12 h. Changing the precursor’s concentration ratio from 0.5 to 1.5 and reaction temperature from 80 °C to 140 °C resulted in the increase of UiO-66 particle size from 30 to 150 nm. The highest surface area of ca. 1,300 m2/g was achieved at concentration ratio of 1 and temperature of 120 °C with bi-modal pore sizes of ca 0.60 nm and 1.25 nm, respectively. The UiO-66 particles with the highest surface area were then employed to capture carbon dioxide from a binary gas mixture. Results from CO2 adsorption capacity measurement using UiO-66 indicate that the adsorbent was capable of capturing 1.3611 mmol/g at pressure of 1.5-1.7 bar and flowrate of 300 cm3/min.