Facile syntheses of tetrahedral imidazolate framework for CO2 separation

Highlights: • Facile methods are explored for the fast and upscale syntheses of tetrahedral imidazolate framework TIF-A1. • The as-synthesized samples exhibited high stability and porosity. • TIF-A1 exhibited high selective adsorption of CO₂ over N₂ and CH₄. Exploring the facile synthesis of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) is necessary for their future industrial applications. In this work, the former reported a three dimensional (3D) tetrahedral imidazolate framework TIF-A1 with formula as Zn(int)(ad)• DMF (Hint=isonicotinic acid, Had=adenine) has been synthesized by various facile methods. Interestingly, TIF-A1 can be easily obtained by heating reactants at 120°C in short time (30min) with high yield (ca. 83%), which are furtherly used to realize the upscale synthesis (>800g) of TIF-A1. More importantly, highly crystalline TIF-A1 showed high adsorption selectivity of CO₂ over N₂ (73) and CH₄ (21) under ambient conditions.