Methane absorption ability improvement of MOF-801 atmospheric pressure plasma treatment

Over the past few years, global warming crisis has increased the needs for technologies to remove greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Various technologies such as catalyst, absorbents, and plasma are being applied, and they are not only solitary but also converged each other to cause synergetic effects. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been attracted as a promising absorbent for carbo dioxide and methane capture. Plasma technology is also receiving attention as an important technology for converting greenhouse gases. However, in this work, we imply plasma discharge effect to improve MOFs absorption performance rather than gas conversion. We demonstrated that plasma exposed MOF-801 increases methane absorptivity by up to 30% through missing-linker defects within only 10 minutes of treatment time [1]. A facile, rapid, and environmentally friendly plasma treatment rather than hazardous chemical treatment was employed. Not only argon plasma treatment, also ambient air discharge can make similar effect of defection. It was also confirmed through XRD data, etc. that the structure and bonding of the MOF itself did not change. Through changes in methane adsorption rate depending on the discharge gas, we were able to determine which active species had a significant influence on defection generation. We expect that this research will play a significant role in suggesting pretreatment process conditions for improving the performance of MOFs.