The quest for advanced designer adsorbents for air filtration and monitoring hazardous trace gases has recently been more and more driven by the need to ensure clean air in indoor, outdoor, and industrial environments. How to increase safety with regard to personal protection in the event of hazardous gas exposure is a critical question for an ever-growing population spending most of their lifetime indoors, but is also crucial for the chemical industry in order to protect future generations of employees from potential hazards. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are already quite advanced and promising in terms of capacity and specific affinity to overcome limitations of current adsorbent materials for trace and toxic gas adsorption. Due to their advantageous features (e.g., high specific surface area, catalytic activity, tailorable pore sizes, structural diversity, and range of chemical and physical properties), MOFs offer a high potential as adsorbents for air filtration and monitoring of hazardous trace gases. Three advanced topics are considered here, in applying MOFs for selective adsorption: (i) toxic gas adsorption toward filtration for respiratory protection as well as indoor and cabin air, (ii) enrichment of hazardous gases using MOFs, and (iii) MOFs as sensors for toxic trace gases and explosives.

In this study, a new innovative adsorption screening method, Infrasorp technology, is presented as a quick and efficient measurement tool for the determination of H 2 S adsorption capacity and compared to breakthrough measurements. Using zinc oxide nanoparticles and metal−organic framework materials, a clear correlation between those two techniques was found, showing the broad applicability of the method for different classes of materials and the potential of Infrasorp to be used as an alternative or preliminary analysis to breakthrough measurements. This tool saves time and costs and speeds up characterization of new materials thanks to the feasibility of a quick and easy wide screening using a small amount of adsorbent.