Integration of ordered porous materials for targeted three-component gas separation

Separation of multi-component mixtures in an energy-efficient manner has important practical impact in chemical industry but is highly challenging. Especially, targeted simultaneous removal of multiple impurities to purify the desired product in one-step separation process is an extremely difficult task. We introduced a pore integration strategy of modularizing ordered pore structures with specific functions for on-demand assembly to deal with complex multi-component separation systems, which are unattainable by each individual pore. As a proof of concept, two ultramicroporous nanocrystals (one for C₂H₂-selective and the other for CO₂-selective) as the shell pores were respectively grown on a C₂H₆-selective ordered porous material as the core pore. Both of the respective pore-integrated materials show excellent one-step ethylene production performance in dynamic breakthrough separation experiments of C₂H₂/C₂H₄/C₂H₆ and CO₂/C₂H₄/C₂H₆ gas mixture, and even better than that from traditional tandem-packing processes originated from the optimized mass/heat transfer. Thermodynamic and dynamic simulation results explained that the pre-designed pore modules can perform specific target functions independently in the pore-integrated materials.