To eliminate the extreme cooling and high pressures used to separate ethylene and ethane, an international team of scientists, including researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, designed a sorbent that greatly prefers ethylene. Specialized windshield glass, everyday plastic water bottles, and countless other products are based onethylene, a simple two-carbon molecule, which requires an energy-intense separation process to pluck the desired chemical away from nearly identical ethane. To eliminate the extreme cooling required in the separation, an international team including researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory designed a material with a porous framework that greatly prefers ethylene. What makes this material particularly potent is that the highly selective sorbent is stable in air and water. In addition, the framework offers a high surface area that speeds the sorting. The material contains silver that binds with the electrons around ethylene’s double-bonded carbon atoms. These electrons are known as π electrons or the π cloud. Every year, billions of tons of ethylene are produced by steam cracking and thermally decomposing ethane. Because ethylene and ethane are roughly the same size and become gases at nearly the same temperature, separating the molecules is extremely difficult on a large scale. This study describes a promising material
The post Cherry picking molecules based on their Pi electrons has been published on Technology Org.
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