Business time pour les Metal-Organic Frameworks ? !
Résumé
Over the past three decades, the domain of porous solids has been expanded by the
discovery of various “cornerstone” materials, such as ALPO molecular sieves (1982),
carbon nanotubes (1991), ordered silica mesoporous materials (1992) and CMK (1999), to
name a few. Porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) were already described in the
Handbook of Porous Solids (Wiley-VCH) in 2002. Since that time, this class of materials
has become much better known and much more widely studied. The number of publications
dealing with MOFs and porous coordination polymers is currently increasing at an
exponential rate – with the total doubling every two years. In 2009, we could account for
about 1200 new publications, a rate similar to that observed for ordered mesoporous
materials. Thanks to their hybrid formulation, MOFs bridge the gap between pure inorganic
and organic materials.
Some MOFs are regarded as a new type of molecular sieve material with a pore size
between those of inorganic zeolites (<1 nm) and ordered mesoporous silica materials (>2
nm). Thanks to this pore window, some MOF exhibit unique water adsorption properties
with a sharp and fully reversible water uptake at 10-20 % of relative himidity (see figure).
This property make them very attractive for heat-pump and adsorbent based chiller
applications since they outperform currently used porous materials. On the other hand, some
other MOFs show outstanding water uptake at low RH whereas some others have the largest
water uptage reported so far.
The company BASF has announced commercial use of MOFs for the storage of Natual Gas
in heavy trucks in the next 12 months.
We will show that the latest generation of MOFs:
- are chemically and thermally stable
- are cost competitive
- can be produced by scalable process, inlcuding shaping