Dillon Sinanan

The adsorption of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene isomers, also known as BTEX, from the gas phase into porous thin films of the metal–organic framework UiO-66-X, where X = H, NH₂, and NO₂, was measured to quantify adsorption capacity. The thin films were grown by a vapor-conversion method onto Au-coated quartz microbalance crystals. The MOF thin films were characterized by IR and Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The thin films were activated by heating under high vacuum and exposed to each gas to calculate the Henry’s constant. The results demonstrate that the functional groups in the organic linker and missing-linkers both play important roles in the adsorption capacity. Several trends can be observed in the data. First, all the compounds in the BTEX family have lower Henry’s constants in the UiO-66-H films compared to the UiO-66-NH₂ and UiO-66-NO₂ films, which can largely be attributed to the absence of a functional group on the linker. Second, at 25 °C, the Henry’s constants for all the BTEX compounds in UiO-66-NO₂ films are larger than UiO-66-NH₂ films. Third, the role of missing linkers is addressed by comparing the measured adsorption capacity to ideal pore filling. The results show that the UiO-66-H films are the most defect-free and the UiO-66-NO₂ films have the most missing linker defects.