Browsing by Author "Haslak, Z. P."

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Open Access
Accelerating discovery of COFs for CO2 capture and H2 purification using structurally guided computational screening
(Elsevier, 2022-01-01) Aksu, G. O.; Fındıkçı, İlknur Eruçar; Haslak, Z. P.; Keskin, S.; Mechanical Engineering; FINDIKÇI, Ilknur Eruçar
Screening of hypothetical covalent organic framework (hypoCOF) database enables to go beyond the current synthesized structures to design high-performance materials for CO2 separation. In this work, we followed a structurally guided computational screening approach to find the most promising candidates of hypoCOF adsorbents and membranes for CO2 capture and H2 purification. Grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations were used to evaluate CO2/H2 separation performance of 3184 hypoCOFs for pressure-swing adsorption (PSA) and vacuum-swing adsorption (VSA) processes. CO2/H2 adsorption selectivities and CO2 working capacities of hypoCOFs were calculated in the range of 6.13–742 (6.39–954) and 0.07–8.68 mol/kg (0.01–3.92 mol/kg), achieving higher values than those of experimentally synthesized COFs at PSA (VSA) conditions. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed that the strength of hydrogen bonding between CO2 and the functional group of linkers is an important factor for determining the CO2 selectivity of hypoCOFs. The most predominant topologies and linker types were identified as bor and pts, linker91 (a triazine linker) and linker92 (a benzene linker) for the top-performing hypoCOF adsorbents, respectively. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of 794 hypoCOFs showed that they exceed the Robeson's upper bound by outperforming COF, zeolite, metal organic framework (MOF), and polymer membranes due to their high H2/CO2 selectivities, 2.66–6.14, and high H2 permeabilities, 9×105–4.5×106 Barrer. Results of this work will be useful to guide the synthesis of novel materials by providing molecular-level insights into the structural features of hypothetical COFs to achieve superior CO2 separation performance.
Open Access
Exploring covalent organic frameworks for H2S+CO2 separation from natural gas using efficient computational approaches
(Elsevier, 2022-08) Aksu, G. Ö.; Fındıkçı, İlknur Eruçar; Haslak, Z. P.; Keskin, S.; Mechanical Engineering; FINDIKÇI, Ilknur Eruçar
Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are emerged as strong adsorbent candidates for industrial gas separation applications due to their highly porous structures. In this work, we explored H2S+CO2 capture potentials of synthesized and computer-generated COFs from a natural gas mixture using an efficient, multi-level computational screening approach. We computed the adsorption data of a six-component natural gas mixture, CH4/C2H6/CO2/C3H8/H2S/H2O, for 580 synthesized COFs by performing Grand Canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations under industrially relevant conditions. H2S+CO2 selectivities and working capacities of COFs were computed to be 0.4-12.4 (0.2-8.5) and 0.01-5.36 (0.04-2.5) mol/kg at pressure-swing adsorption (vacuum-swing adsorption) condition. NPN-3 was identified as the best performing COF due to the competitive adsorption of H2S+CO2 over C2H6 and C3H8 as revealed by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Structural (pore sizes, porosities, and topologies) and chemical properties (linker units and heats of gas adsorption) of the best-performing synthesized COFs were used to efficiently screen the very large number of hypothetical COFs (hypoCOFs). Results showed that isosteric heats of adsorption can be used to discover high performing hypoCOFs for H2S+CO2 separation from natural gas. Finally, we compared COFs, hypoCOFs, zeolites, carbon nanotubes, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and concluded that several synthesized and computer-generated COFs can outperform traditional adsorbents in terms of H2S+CO2 selectivities. Our results provide molecular-level insights about the potential of COFs for natural gas purification and direct the design and development of new COF materials with high H2S+CO2 selectivities.