Improvements to the production of ZIF-94; a case study in MOF scale-up

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013), under grant agreement no. 608490, M4CO2 project.The ability to produce large scale quantities of MOF materials is essential for the commercialisation of these frameworks to continue. Herein we report how the production of ZIF-94 can be improved from a ∼1 g laboratory preparation to a scalable procedure allowing for large scale production of the desired framework. The synthesis of ZIF-94 was completed at room temperature, atmospheric pressure and without the use of DMF as a solvent. This method offers improvements over the current literature synthesis routes and affords a product at 18 wt% solids. To demonstrate the robustness of the derived methodology a 60 g, large scale, batch of this framework was produced which possessed a surface area of 468 m2 g−1. This large scale sample has superior CO2 uptake of 3.3 mmol g−1 at 1 bar, an improvement of 30% over literature reports.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe