Carbon Dioxide Absorption in Metal Organic Frameworks

PhDWith the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) becoming an international worry due its role in climate change, solutions such as CO2 capture and storage technologies are needed to decrease the emissions. The main proportion of CO2 gas emissions is from fossil fuel combustion in a range of industries, including power generation. To develop the CO2 capture system for these operations, new materials are needed for CO2 capture. Metal-organic framework (MOF) materials have porous crystal structures containing organic molecules (organic ligands) linked to each other by metalcontaining nodes. The large internal surface area can be exploited for the adsorption of small gas molecules, and for this reason MOFs may be ideal candidate materials for CO2 capture and gas separations. Thousands of MOF materials have been reported, with different combinations of the ligands and metals and with the capability of forming many different network topologies. Experimentally it is very difficult to study the gas absorption dynamics, interaction and gas adsorption capacity for the large number of materials. This problem can be solved by simulations. The aim of the thesis is to develop a systematic simulation method to screen the MOF properties and CO2 adsorption capacity and interaction dynamics at different environment. The molecular dynamics (MD) method with parameterised force fields was used to study the interactions between CO2 molecules and one class of the MOFs, zeolitic imidizolate frameworks (ZIFs) with zinc as the metal cation. To develop the model, the atom charges have been developed by using the distributed multipole analysis (DMA) method based on ab initio DFT calculations for molecules and clusters. The intermolecular forces were developed by fitting against the MP2 calculations of small clusters of the metal cations and molecular ligands. In order to evaluate the models I simulated the gas-liquid coexistence curve of CO2 and showed that it is consistent with experiments. I also simulated the pure ZIF structures on changing both temperature and pressure, demonstrating the stabilities of the structures but also showing the existence of displacive phase transitions. I have used this approach to successfully study CO2 absorption in a number of ZIFs (from ZIF-zni, ZIF-2, ZIF-4, ZIF-8 and ZIF-10) using MD. The gas absorption capacity and dynamics have been investigated under 25 bar and 30 bar, 200 , showing a promising uptake of CO2. The results have shown that CO2 capacity is mainly determined by the pore sizes and pore surfaces, in which a higher capacity is associated with a higher pore surface. The intermolecular distance of CO2 inside the pores and channels have been investigated in the saturation state. It has been shown that the distance is approximately 4 Å. The attraction force is from the interaction between CO2 and the imidazolate ligands. In addition, the systematic studies of the saturated ZIF system gave the minimum diameters for CO2 adsorption which is approximately 4.4 Å. This interaction has caused the gate opening effects, with the imidazolate ligands being pushed to be parallel to the CO2 molecules and opening up to allow more gas molecules go through the channels that connect the pore structures. This gate opening effect also explains the phase transition in ZIF-10 caused by CO2 molecules in our simulation, and can be applied to predict phase transitions in other materials with similar structure such as ZIF-7 and ZIF-8. The dynamics have also shown that the gas diffusion velocity is determined by the pore structure as well and by the accumulated layers of CO2 on the surface prior to being pushed in toward the centre of the material layer by layer. The de-absorption processes have also been studied in these materials by decreasing the pressure from 25 bar to 1 bar under at same temperature. The results indicate that the de-absorption is a reverse process of absorption. The structure of ZIF-10 went through a phase transition induced by CO2 recovered after the guest molecules had been released. The de-absorption can be accelerated by increasing the temperature.Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) Queen Mary University of London Phd studentship, EPSRC funded access to the two high-performance computing service