Influence of Functional Groups and Modification Sites of Metal-Organic Frameworks on CO2/CH4 Separation: A Monte Carlo Simulation Study

Abstract

In order to explore the influence of modification sites of functional groups on landfill gas (CO2/CH4) separation performance of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), six types of organic linkers and three types of functional groups (i.e. -F, -NH2, -CH3) were used to construct 36 MOFs of pcu topology based on copper paddlewheel. Grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations were performed in this work to evaluate the separation performance of MOFs at low (vacuum swing adsorption) and high (pressure swing adsorption) pressures, respectively. Simulation results demonstrated that CO2 working capacity of the unfunctionalized MOFs generally exhibits pore-size dependence at 1 bar, which increases with the decrease in pore sizes. It was also found that -NH2 functionalized MOFs exhibit the highest CO2 uptake due to the enhanced Coulombic interactions between the polar -NH2 groups and the quadrupole moment of CO2 molecules, which is followed by -CH3 and -F functionalized ones. Moreover, positioning the functional groups -NH2 and -CH3 at sites far from the metal node (site b) exhibits more significant enhancement on CO2/CH4 separation performance compared to that adjacent to the metal node (site a).