(July 16, 2015) A
newly discovered family of chemical structures, published in Nature, could
increase the value of biogas and natural gas that contains carbon dioxide. The
new chemical structures, known as zeolites, have been created by an
international team of researchers including Professor Xiaodong Zou and co-workers
from the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm
University.
The zeolites — crystalline aluminosilicates with frameworks
that contain windows and cavities the size of small molecules — can separate
out carbon dioxide more effectively from fuel gases than those previously
known.
Existing zeolites have widespread use in industrial
processes that involve gas separation and catalytic conversion, for example to
remove nitrogen and carbon dioxide from compressed air to generate oxygen in
hospitals and airplanes. There is an ongoing search for new zeolites to add to
those known, to augment the small number of different types used commercially.
Highly complex
zeolites with attractive properties as adsorbents
However, although many millions of novel structures are both
hypothetically possible and energetically feasible, not enough is known about
their formation mechanism to prepare them on demand. Rather, new materials are
discovered via exploratory synthesis as microcrystalline powders and their
structures solved by time-consuming, non-routine approaches.
In the new research published in Nature, research groups
from Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom, have combined structure solution and
prediction with targeted synthesis to prepare a family of novel, highly complex
zeolites, which have attractive properties as adsorbents.