Application of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) for Capturing CO2: Advancement and Challenges

Abstract

The development of suitable solutions for capturing CO2 is one of the leading technical scenarios, among others, to mitigate greenhouse effect. Among all splitting techniques that could potentially address this important challenge, membrane and swing adsorption technologies are recognized to be of great promise for a variety of CO2 containing gas streams in industry. Nevertheless, the deployment of such technologies requires advanced materials with excellent/suitable thermodynamic and kinetics features that are further married to an optimally engineered design. The ultimate purpose is to achieve the desired high CO2 capturing capacity and efficiency. The targeted materials should possess adequate affinity toward CO2, in addition to high CO2 uptake and excellent chemical stability toward impurities such as SOx and NOx. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), solid-sate materials consisting of metal ions or clusters coordinated to organic ligands, showed technically interesting capabilities for gas splitting in general and CO2 capture in particular. This review presents an overview about the perspective of applying MOFs for capturing CO2 from different sources. The authors offer multidisciplinary discussion about the different aspects that would be key elements in progressing or cutting the path of research, development and innovation to final deployment of MOF as adsorbent for capturing CO2. An overview about the main MOFs with reported studies on CO2 capture from different sources will be proposed. Some general direction on how to design MOFs in order to address the trade-off of capacity vs. selectivity, which is highly desirable for large-scale CO2 emitting industries, will also, be given.