EPSCoR Research Fellows: @NASA: Defective Metal-Organic Frameworks for Carbon Dioxide Capture

The increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has significant impacts on global climate. It is imperative to explore new materials for CO2 capture. The goal of this fellowship project is to collaborate with NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) to develop new porous sorbents for CO2 capture at low pressures by exploiting defects in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). The advances of this project will be transformative in guiding the design of effective CO2 solid sorbents and economics of carbon capture. This will enable economic activity to flourish and increase economic competitiveness of the United States. This work will benefit society by providing fundamental scientific understanding of the defective MOF (DMOF) structural properties that exert the greatest control over enhanced CO2 capture. This fellowship will support the PI in transforming her career trajectory and further developing her research potential in developing new sorbents for gas adsorption and separation, water treatment, and energy storage. The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF)-ARC partnership resulting from this fellowship will have a lasting impact on research and workforce development at UAF. It also expands UAF’s capabilities to better serve the public industry, State and Federal agencies, and Alaska’s science community. The increasing concentration of atmospheric CO2 has significant impacts on global climate. Currently, porous sorbents developed for CO2 capture are less effective at low pressures because of poor CO2 selectivity. We propose that the interior of MOFs can be engineered by creating defects through post-synthetic treatments to impart coordinatively unsaturated sites, thereby increasing CO2 adsorption capacity by increasing CO2 affinity to MOF at low pressures. The PI will collaborate with NASA ARC to examine the crystal structures of DMOFs to obtain fundamental knowledge of defect chemistry in DMOFs and understand how structural defects affect CO2 capture. The research objectives are: (1) design and fabricate DMOFs and elucidate the relationship between defect-inducing variables of post-synthetic treatments and the properties of structural defects; (2) measure CO2 adsorption capacity in DMOFs and investigate the structure-property-performance relationship of DMOFs in CO2 capture. This project provides fundamental knowledge in understanding how structural defects can improve CO2 capture in MOFs at low pressures. This will advance the current state of knowledge and provide new strategies for creating DMOFs with targeted CO2 adsorption properties at low pressures. These results will be useful to researchers focused on solid sorbents for many applications important to national prosperity and competitiveness. A fundamental understanding of structure-property-performance relationships of DMOFs in CO2 capture will drive new design strategies for solid sorbents beyond current performance limits for applications such as hydrogen storage and adsorptive separations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.