Biased adsorption of ethane over ethylene on low-cost hyper-crosslinked polymers

Abstract

Adsorption-based separation of C2H6 and C2H4 appears to be an energy efficient alternative to the state-of-the-art cryogenic distillation technology, and adsorbent materials selectively bind C2H6 over C2H4 are long-desired due to its capability to obtain high-purity C2H4. In this paper, a series of hyper-crosslinked polymers (HCPs) enriched with micropores was prepared by the reported Friedel-Crafts “knitting” method. We demonstrate that biased adsorption of C2H6 over C2H4 can be obtained over these HCPs. These results were rarely reported on porous polymers before. Both the obtained C2H6/C2H4 adsorption capacity and selectivity are only slightly lower than several costly metal-organic frameworks. At the same time, we also report adjustment of the micropore size of the HCPs on an angstrom level by simply varying the molar ratio of benzene and FDA in the preparation procedure, this may lead to the development of similar materials for other applications, i.e. adsorption, catalysis, etc.