Highly Selective Gaseous and Liquid-Phase Separation over a Novel Cobalt(II) Metal–Organic Framework

The
mild recognition sites of oxygen atoms and phenyl rings from 5-(4-pyridyl)-methoxyl
isophthalic acid (5,4-PMIA2–) moieties and tetrakis­(4-pyridyloxymethylene)
methane (TPOM) linkers inside the channels of a novel three-dimensional
microporous metal–organic framework (MOF) [Co2(5,4-PMIA)2(TPOM)0.5]·xsolvent (1) are presumed to provide pore environments with moderate
contacts toward guests, as indicated by grand canonical Monte Carlo
simulations, which appear to be beneficial for adsorption and separation
applications. As expected, 1 represents one of the rare
examples that show both high storage capacity of C2Hn and good adsorption selectivity of C2Hn/CH4 and CO2/CH4 under ambient conditions, and yet, it has significantly
lower energy consumption for regeneration. In addition, a validated
submicro-1-based microsolid-phase extraction (μ-SPE)
method for the determination of trace monohydroxylated polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons in complex human urine was developed with satisfactory
sensitivity and good precision by online coupling to liquid chromatography-mass
spectrometry, which represents the first example of a mixed-ligand
MOF applied as an efficient sorbent for μ-SPE.