Performance Comparison of Metal Organic Framework Extrudates and Commercial Zeolite for Ethylene/Ethane Separation

Mg-MOF-74 is one of the most well-known metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and has been widely studied for gas adsorption and separation. Nevertheless, employment of original Mg-MOP-74 in powder form inevitably leads to a high pressure drop across column and even dust pollution in practical application. In this work, we molded powder Mg-MOF-74 into extrudates and "tested its performance on adsorptive separation of ethylene/ethane mixture for the first time, taking commercialised benchmark 13X zeolite as comparison. Powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), specific surface area measurements, and thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) were performed to characterize the transformed samples, and adsorption equilibrium of ethylene and ethane on molded Mg-MOE-74 were measured at 273 and 298 K and pressure up to 1 bar. The potential industrial application of molded Mg-MOF-74 was examined through breakthrough and regeneration experiments, revealing that molded Mg-MOF-74 was feasible and stable enough to be exploited as adsorbent of adsorptive separation of ethylene/ethane.