Enhanced Breakthrough Efficiency by a Chemically Stable Porous Coordination Polymer with Optimized Nanochannel.

High separation efficiency is very important for process of pressure swing adsorption (PSA) in the industry. Herein, we propose a fine design of chemically stable porous coordination polymers (PCPs) with optimized nanochannel by strategy of inserting and shifting shortest alkyl group on T-shaped ligand. Remarkably, the synergistic effect of optimized nanochannel, unique crystal morphology and fitted channel enable sharply enhanced breakthrough efficiency of C2H6/4/CH4, 1.17 or 0.77 g of CH4 can be separated from corresponding dual mixtures (2/8, v/v) by 1 g of NTU-25 at 273 K, which was further validated and understood by controlled experiments and density functional theory (DFT) computations.