Biased adsorption of ethane over ethylene on low-cost hyper-crosslinked polymers.

Abstract Adsorption-based separation of C 2 H 6 and C 2 H 4 appears to be an energy efficient alternative to the state-of-the-art cryogenic distillation technology, and adsorbent materials selectively bind C 2 H 6 over C 2 H 4 are long-desired due to its capability to obtain high-purity C 2 H 4. In this paper, a series of hyper-crosslinked polymers (HCPs) enriched with micropores was prepared by the reported Friedel-Crafts "knitting" method. We demonstrate that biased adsorption of C 2 H 6 over C 2 H 4 can be obtained over these HCPs. These results were rarely reported on porous polymers before. Both the obtained C 2 H 6 /C 2 H 4 adsorption capacity and selectivity are only slightly lower than several costly metal-organic frameworks. At the same time, we also report adjustment of the micropore size of the HCPs on an angstrom level by simply varying the molar ratio of benzene and FDA in the preparation procedure, this may lead to the development of similar materials for other applications, i.e. adsorption, catalysis, etc. Graphical abstract Hyper-crosslinked polymers prepared by Friedel-Crafts "knitting" from benzene and formaldehyde dimethyl acetal showed unusual biased adsorption of C 2 H 6 over C 2 H 4. fx1 Highlights • C 2 H 4 /C 2 H 6 adsorption performance on HCPs was reported for the first time. • Biased adsorption of C 2 H 6 over C 2 H 4 was achieved on the HCPs. • Adjustment of the micropore size on an angstrom level was achieved. • Friedel-Crafts "knitting" strategy, which is low cost and facile, may lead to broad interests in practical applications such as adsorption, catalysis, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]