A breath of fresh air: MOFs in clean-air technology

Speaker: Dr Jiangnan Li, University of Manchester

Winner: 2021 RSC Dalton Emerging Researcher Award

Air pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for nearly one in five premature deaths worldwide. Among the air pollutants, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) play notorious roles causing serious health damage and environment issues even at ppm level. The state-of-art techniques on deNOx (selective catalytic reduction, SCR) and desulfurization (wet scrubber flue gas desulfurization, wet-FGD) suffers some fatal disadvantages including intensive energy consumption, low removal efficiency and excessive solid waste generation. Hence, the pressing need exists for the development of new effective deNOx and desulfurization technologies. The gas capture by porous materials represents a promising platform for clean-air technology. However, the extremely corrosive and reactive nature of NOx and SO2 hinders its rapid development. In my research, I dedicate to the design and synthesis of robust metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), an emerging porous materials with wide application in adsorption, separation, sensing and catalysis etc. The MOFs we developed have been successfully applied to the capture and conversion of NOx and SO2, which enable the integration/transformation of nitrogen/sulfur-based air pollutants into the production of value-added fine chemicals fulfilling the ‘waste-to- chemicals’ conversion and air cleaning target.