OCS Seminars
Casey Wade: Bioinspired MOFs for Trace CO2 Capture
Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere has a wide variety of essential applications on Earth and in space. Reducing CO2 is especially relevant for enclosed spaces, such as spacecraft, where excessive concentrations can have negative impacts on human health. Metal-organic framework’s (MOF) porous structure has shown great potential in carbon sequestration.
Abstract:
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as versatile adsorbents for molecular separation processes owing to their well-defined, porous structures and tunable chemical functionality that enable guest-selective interactions. They have attracted considerable interest for CO2 capture applications, particularly under flue gas conditions where CO2 makes up 5-15 % of emissions. However, MOFs capable of selective CO2 capture at trace concentrations (≤ 5000 ppm) remain rare. This presentation will describe our recent efforts to design MOFs containing nucleophilic transition metal hydroxide functional groups as solid adsorbents for trace CO2 capture applications such as atmosphere revitalization in NASA spacecraft. Amild and convenient postsynthetic modification protocol has been developed to generate biomimetic Zn-OH species at the inorganic building units of benzotriazolate-based MOFs. The resulting materials shows excellent performance for trace CO2 capture, and IR spectroscopic data and density functional theory calculations reveal a CO2/HCO3– chemisorption mechanism that is aided by cooperative hydrogen bonding interactions
Biography:
Casey receivedhis B.S. in chemistry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 where he discovered f-orbitals and developed a passion for inorganic chemistry in the lab of Prof. John Belot. He completed his PhD at Texas A&M University studying the chemistry of p-block elements under the supervision of Prof. François Gabbaï. In 2011, he moved to MIT to work with Prof. Mircea Dincă and study the chemistry of metal-organic frameworks. He started his independent career as assistant professor of chemistry at Brandeis University in 2013 and moved to THE Ohio State University in 2018. His research group explores the synthesis and properties of new molecules and porous materials (i.e. metal-organic frameworks) with applications in catalysis and molecular separation.
