Abstract
The physical adsorbents have shown great promise for the removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene but they still suffer from low uptake and poor selectivity especially when VOCs are present at trace concentrations. In this work, we demonstrate the successful implementation of pore-space-partition (PSP) strategy on rigid NU-1500-type metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) containing organic vertices, which has led to a series of MOFs with near-organic backbones (metal mass fraction as low as 5%) and record trace benzene adsorption. The PSP on rigid acs MOFs here relies on precise size match and symmetry match between the partitioning ligands and the frameworks. NNM-750-Fe, a structure constructed by partitioning NU-1500 with large π-conjugated hexaazaphenalene-based ligand, exhibits significantly enhanced low-pressure benzene capture than NU-1500-Fe, which far exceeds previous records (42%-69% higher) at a wide pressure range (P/P0 from 0.003 to 0.01). DFT calculations reveal that the hexaazaphenalene core has a higher benzene affinity than the open metal sites in pristine NU-1500.