Pollution, two new materials capable of capturing benzene
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A group of scientists fromUniversity of Manchester has just developed a couple of new materials, stable and porous, capable of capturing and separating the benzene. The discovery is important because benzene, which belongs to the family of so-called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, is very common in the air (it is a component of petroleum derivatives and therefore is found in the exhaust gases of motor vehicles, fumes from industrial plants and combustion events) and is highly toxic, so much so that it has been classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in group 1, that of substances considered “certainly carcinogenic to humans”. The scientific article describing the details of the discovery was published in the journal Chem.
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The newly synthesized materials belong to the family of so-called organometallic lattices, or metal organic frameworks (Mofs), crystalline compounds formed by “clumps” of metals and empty spaces, within which gases such as hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide and, precisely, benzene can be stored. Newcomers are called UiO-66 And MFM-300 and have been designed to attract and ‘trap’ benzene into gaps in the structure.
“The most interesting part of our job,” he explained Martin Schröderprofessor at the British university’s faculty of science and engineering and co-author of the work, “lies in the fact that these new materials not only allow us to capture and remove benzene from the air, but also to separate it from cyclohexane, a product very common industrial product most often derived from benzene. Due to the fact that benzene and cyclohexane have very similar boiling temperatures – they differ by just 0.6°C – until now it was very difficult and expensive to separate them by distillation or other methods”.
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Traditional benzene recapture systems, based for example on activated carbon filters or on zeolitealso have structural impurities which greatly reduce their efficiency: and this problem also seems to be greatly mitigated with the use of new materials.
“The crystalline nature of organometallic lattices,” he commented Sihay Yanganother of the authors of the work, “allows the precise observation of the chemical phenomena that occur there, with spatial resolution of the order of the size of the individual atoms, using spectroscopy and diffraction techniques. It is precisely thanks to this detailed understanding of the relationships between the structure of the lattice and its properties that it is possible to design new absorbent materials with better performance in terms of benzene capture”.
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