Novel Porous Liquid Materials for Gas Separations

2025/4/1

Professor Chia-Wen Wu and Professor Dun-Yen Kang's team from the Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, National Taiwan University, collaborated with Professor Shuhei Furukawa from Kyoto University to form an international research team. Together, they developed an innovative porous liquid material membrane technology. Their research findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Gas separation and purification play a crucial role in industry. However, most existing porous materials for gas separation are solid-state materials, which lack tunability in their physical states. Maintaining the porous characteristics of these materials during changes in their physical state is a highly challenging problem. A team led by Professors Chia-Wen Wu and Dun-Yen Kang from the College of Engineering at National Taiwan University, in collaboration with Kyoto University, has developed a novel porous liquid film technology with tunable phase-change physical properties. The core of this innovative material lies in the combination of metal-organic polyhedrons (MOPs) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) chains. By coordinating 12 PEG chains to the surface of RhMOP and applying different heat treatments, a phase-changeable porous film is obtained. This novel liquid porous film demonstrates exceptional performance in capturing CO₂, exhibiting high CO₂ permeability (180 Barrer) and high CO₂/H₂ selectivity (7.51 ± 1.56), enabling efficient separation of CO₂ from CO₂/H₂ mixtures.

Full journal article: Nature Communications (2024) 15, 9523.

 

Figure 1. Illustration of phase change of porous liquid

 

Figure 2. Results of membrane gas separation from porous liquid membranes