Xenon Recovery at Room Temperature using Metal-Organic Frameworks

Xenon is known to be a very efficient anesthetic gas, but its cost prohibits the wider use in medical industry and other potential applications. It has been shown that Xe recovery and recycling from anesthetic gas mixtures can significantly reduce its cost as anesthetic. The current technology uses series of adsorbent columns followed by low-temperature distillation to recover Xe; this method is expensive to use in medical facilities. Herein, we propose a much simpler and more efficient system to recover and recycle Xe from exhaled anesthetic gas mixtures at room temperature using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Among the MOFs tested, PCN-12 exhibits unprecedented performance with high Xe capacity and Xe/O-2, Xe/N-2 and Xe/CO2 selectivity at room temperature. The in situ synchrotron measurements suggest that Xe is occupies the small pockets of PCN-12 compared to unsaturated metal centers (UMCs). Computational modeling of adsorption further supports our experimental observation of Xe binding sites in PCN-12.