Regulating adsorption performance of zeolites by pre-activation in electric fields
Loading...
Date
2023-09-06
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
While multiple external stimuli (e.g., temperature, light, pressure) have been reported to regulate gas adsorption, limited studies have been conducted on controlling molecular admission in nanopores through the application of electric fields (E-field). Here we show gas adsorption capacity and selectivity in zeolite molecular sieves can be regulated by an external E-field. Through E-field pre-activation during degassing, several zeolites exhibited enhanced CO2 adsorption and decreased CH4 and N2 adsorptions, improving the CO2/CH4 and CO2/N2 separation selectivity by at least 25%. The enhanced separation performance of the zeolites pre-activated by E-field was maintained in multiple adsorption/desorption cycles. Powder X-ray diffraction analysis and ab initio computational studies revealed that the cation relocation and framework expansion induced by the E-field accounted for the changes in gas adsorption capacities. These findings demonstrate a regulation approach to sharpen the molecular sieving capability by E-fields and open new avenues for carbon capture and molecular separations. © The Author(s) 2023 - Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
Keywords
Adsorption, Zeolites, Activation analysis, Electric fields, Gas analysis, Diffraction, Cations, Carbon, Materials, Temperature range
Citation
Chen, K., Yu, Z., Mousavi, S. H., Singh, R., Gu, Q., Snurr, R. Q., Webley, P. A., & Li, G. K. (2023). Regulating adsorption performance of zeolites by pre-activation in electric fields. Nature Communications, 14(1), 5479. doi:10.1038/s41467-023-41227-4