Recent Advances and Challenges of Metal-Organic Frameworks for Ethylene/Ethane Separation

Ethylene/ethane separation has always been a challenging and costly process due to energy-intensive distillation while metal-organic frameworks have been regarded as a new strategy with the bright potential for this separation, profit from their porous structure. In this paper, key factors for ethylene/ethane separation are discussed and the performance of some benchmark MOFs is summarized in addition to the discussion of potential challenges and future outlook of their application on an industrial scale. Their results of neutron powder diffraction experiments, selectivity calculation and breakthrough experiments are summarized to demonstrate their efficacy in gas separation. It can be concluded that [Ca (C 4 O 4 )(H 2 O)] (UTSA-280) is one of the most promising candidates and ethylene-selective MOFs generally have better performance than ethane-selective ones.