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Clarkson professor awarded $110,000 grant from American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund

Posted 3/4/16

Clarkson University Assistant Professor Mario Wriedt was recently awarded a $110,000 grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) for his research on metal-organic …

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Clarkson professor awarded $110,000 grant from American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund

Posted

Clarkson University Assistant Professor Mario Wriedt was recently awarded a $110,000 grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) for his research on metal-organic frameworks.

The Doctoral New Investigator grant supports a two-year project that began in January called "Tunable Host-Guest Interactions in Photo-Functional Metal-Organic Frameworks."

Metal-organic frameworks are a new class of highly porous materials that Wriedt compares to a jungle gym structure, where the nodes represent metal clusters, the struts are organic ligands, and the pores of the framework are accessible for guest molecules.

Wriedt said this technology can be applied to the energy landscape, allowing for small-molecule separation of petroleum products and natural gas storage and purification, according to a press release from Clarkson.

For example, the MOFs can be used to refine industrial relevant petroleum gases, such as methane, by selectively adsorbing carbon dioxide molecules, one of the major impurities in raw natural gases. Internal electric charges are proposed to attract these polar gas molecules into the MOF pores like a magnet, the release said.

Once the carbon dioxide is captured, the molecules must be released so they can be reused or put into storage, Wriedt said, but the tricky part is that this capture and release process should have a very low energy requirement to be efficient.

"What we propose to do is use light as a trigger to release CO2, so we design photoactive zwitterionic molecules as MOF building blocks that exhibit electric field gradients on their molecular surfaces," he said.

Zwitterions are sensitive to external stimuli, such as light and temperature, which allows the adsorption properties to be controlled significantly. Exposure to light allows the carbon dioxide molecules to be released and prevents the MOF from attracting other carbon dioxide molecules, the release said.

Wriedt said a preliminary study has shown that a significant amount of carbon dioxide molecules can be captured and released with this new adsorption-desorption process.