Microporous rod metal-organic frameworks with diverse Zn/Cd-triazolate ribbons as secondary building units for CO2 uptake and selective adsorption of hydrocarbons.

The synthetic design of new porous open-framework materials with pre-designed pore properties for desired applications such as gas adsorption and separation remains challenging. We proposed one such class of materials, rod metal-organic frameworks (rod MOFs), which can be tuned by using rod secondary building units (rod SBUs) with different geometrical and chemical features. Our approach takes advantage of the readily accessible metal-triazolate 1-D motifs as rod SBUs to combine with dicarboxylate ligands to prepare target rod MOFs. Herein we report three such metal-triazolate-dicarboxylate frameworks (SNNU-21, -22 and -23). During the formation of these three MOFs, Cd or Zn ions are firstly connected by 1,2,4-triazole through the N1,N2,N4-mode to form 1-D metal-organic ribbon-like rod SBUs, which further joint four adjacent rod SBUs via eight BDC linkers to give 3-D microporous frameworks. However, tuned by the different NH2 groups from metal-triazolate rod SBUs, different space groups, pore sizes and shapes are observed for SNNU-21-23. All of these rod MOFs show not only remarkable CO2 uptake capacity, but also high CO2 over CH4 and C2-hydrocarbons over CH4 selectivity under ambient conditions. Specially, SNNU-23 exhibits a very high isosteric heat of adsorption (Qst) for C2H2 (62.2 kJ mol-1), which outperforms the values of all MOF materials reported to date including the famous MOF-74-Co.