(264g) Fabrication & Modeling of Percolation Aided Continuous Coating of Metal Organic Frameworks on Porous Substrates

Significant advancements have been made towards fabrication of Metallic Organic Frameworks (MOFs) on porous and solid substrates in the past two decades. To enhance the physical and chemical stability of the films, approaches for fabrication have oscillated between top-down and bottom-up techniques. While both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, a room for enhancing the synthetic processes for robust, well-controlled and scalable films remains an ongoing collective effort of researchers. This work addresses these concerns by proposing a novel percolation assisted, continuous microfluidic approach to depositing HKUST-1 on a porous substrate yielding to a wide range of desired film thicknesses and mass loading on the substrate. Although microfluidic, the modeling approach employed in this work to designing the reactor, can be easily scaled up and deployed to fabricate films of various class of MOFs and COFs. MOF films on porous substrates have wide range of applicability in the field of catalysis, CO₂ -RR and adsorption and gas separations. The synthesized films in this work are further utilized to demonstrate CH₄-H₂ gas mixture separation. The designed device is also shown to be applicable to synthesize films of various MOFs like MOF-5, MOF-505 (demonstrated in this work), UIO-66 etc over a wide range of porous substrates. Lastly, this work proposes a possible scale-up approach into fabricating multiple films and large-scale films by means of simple design modifications to the proposed device in this work.