High Throughput Adsorption Screening of MOFs Using infraSORB

High throughput synthesis processes are more frequently used to develop porous materials such as zeolites, activated carbons or novel metal-organic frameworks (MOF). Numerous synthesis parameters are varied to identify the sometimes only very small process window for product fabrication or to optimize existing synthesis routes. The fabricated products are volumetrically or gravimetrically analyzed to determine their adsorption behaviour. These characterization techniques are time consuming and relatively expensive. The bottleneck in high throughput synthesis therefore lies in finding the few but promising highly porous samples. An enormous cost- and timesaving potential would be accessible by a significantly accelerated but simultaneously equally reliable screening of the synthesized products.
For this application we present the new infraSORB screening tool which can test up to 12 samples for specific surface area and porosity within 5-10 minutes. Various measurements with different MOF samples were carried out. A good correlation between BET surface area and the results of the infraSORB could be determined which allows estimating the BET surface area of an unknown MOF sample with an accuracy of +/-10% from the infraSORB data. Also the application of the instruments on different classes of porous materials such as zeolites and activated carbons will be presented.