(3dc) Synthesis and Gas Adsorption Study of Porous MOF Materials

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) or porous coordination polymers (PCPs) have become the focus of intense study over the past decade due to their potential for advancing a variety of applications including air purification, gas storage, adsorption separations, catalysis, gas sensing, drug delivery, and so on.  These materials have some distinct advantages over traditional porous materials such as the well-defined structures, uniform pore sizes, chemically functionalized sorption sites, and potential for post-synthetic modification etc. Thus, synthesis and adsorption studies of porous MOFs have increased substantially in recent years. During my PhD study in School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, the major goal of my project is to search, synthesize, and test these novel hybrid porous materials for adsorptive removal of toxic industrial chemicals (TICs) and chemical warfare agents (CWAs), and installing the benchmark for new-generation nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) filters. Our work demonstrates that MOFs provide significant improvement over the current NBC filters (an impregnated activated carbon), and are potential advanced materials for improved air purification system which have wide applications involving individual protective device and collective protective system.