Green Science Alliance confirms absorption of CO2 with their Metal Organic Framework

In Japan, the Green Science Alliance has been synthesizing various type of metal organic frameworks and have been trying to apply MOF to rechargeable battery, fuel cell, water vapor adsorption, gas adsorption, metal adsorption, deodorizing, photocatalysis, artificial photosynthesis etc. and found that certain kinds of MOF have strong CO2 adsorption capability.

This time, Mr. Tetsuro Kajino, Mr. Hirohisa Iwabayashi and Dr. Ryohei Mori at Green Science Alliance tested various type of MOFs which is synthesized in their company and found that certain kinds of MOF have strong CO2 adsorption capability.  Since they have confirmed this fact, they will try to create CO2 absorption device and artificial photosynthesis application etc. in order to challenge to solve global warming problem.

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs), also known as porous coordination polymers (PCPs), are materials composed of metal cations and organic ligands that bridge component metals. MOFs are synthesized as super-porous materials by modifying their metal and organic ligand, as well as the shape and size of pores. Pore size can be controlled in less than nm order and MOF possess extremely large specific surface area (1000 – 9000 m2/g) and their chemical group can be tailored at the molecular level.

With conventional porous materials such as activated carbon, zeolite, and mesoporous silica, it was difficult to create such exact porous structure with desired shape and pore size. Although with MOF, one can artificially design the structure, surface area, shape and size of the pores at the molecular level. Theoretically, MOFs can be prepared by combining numbers of metals and organic ligands; so that more than 40,000 kinds of MOFs have been already reported. Because MOFs are completely new ultimate inorganic–organic hybrid porous materials, chemical industry and academic researchers have recently been highly focused on them.