Barely porous organic cages for hydrogen isotope separation

Abstract

Quantum sieves for hydrogen isotopes One method for improving the efficiency of separation of hydrogen from deuterium (D) is to exploit kinetic quantum sieving with nanoporous solids. This method requires ultrafine pore apertures (around 3 angstroms), which usually leads to low pore volumes and low D 2 adsorption capacities. Liu et al. used organic synthesis to tune the pore size of the internal cavities of organic cage molecules. A hybrid cocrystal contained both a small-pore cage that imparted high selectivity and a larger-pore cage that enabled high D 2 uptake. Science , this issue p. 613