Understanding the molecular details of CO(2)-sorbent interactions is critical for the design of better carbon-capture systems. Here we report crystallographic resolution of CO(2) molecules and their binding domains in a metal-organic framework functionalized with amine groups. Accompanying computational studies that modeled the gas sorption isotherms, high heat of adsorption, and CO(2) lattice positions showed high agreement on all three fronts. The modeling apportioned specific binding interactions for each CO(2) molecule, including substantial cooperative binding effects among the guest molecules. The validation of the capacity of such simulations to accurately model molecular-scale binding bodes well for the theory-aided development of amine-based CO(2) sorbents. The analysis shows that the combination of appropriate pore size, strongly interacting amine functional groups, and the cooperative binding of CO(2) guest molecules is responsible for the low-pressure binding and large uptake of CO(2) in this sorbent material.

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Millions of distinct metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) can be made by combining metal nodes and organic linkers. At present, over 90,000 MOFs have been synthesized and over 500,000 predicted. This raises the question whether a new experimental or predicted structure adds new information. For MOF chemists, the chemical design space is a combination of pore geometry, metal nodes, organic linkers, and functional groups, but at present we do not have a formalism to quantify optimal coverage of chemical design space. In this work, we develop a machine learning method to quantify similarities of MOFs to analyse their chemical diversity. This diversity analysis identifies biases in the databases, and we show that such bias can lead to incorrect conclusions. The developed formalism in this study provides a simple and practical guideline to see whether new structures will have the potential for new insights, or constitute a relatively small variation of existing structures.

Pore volume is one of the main properties for the characterization of microporous crystals. It is experimentally measurable, and it can also be obtained from the refined unit cell by a number of computational techniques. In this work, we assess the accuracy and the discrepancies between the different computational methods which are commonly used for this purpose, i.e, geometric, helium, and probe center pore volumes, by studying a database of more than 5000 frameworks. We developed a new technique to fully characterize the internal void of a microporous material and to compute the probe-accessible and -occupiable pore volume. We show that, unlike the other definitions of pore volume, the occupiable pore volume can be directly related to the experimentally measured pore volumes from nitrogen isotherms.

In this work, we have developed quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models using advanced machine learning algorithms that can rapidly and accurately recognize high-performing metal organic framework (MOF) materials for CO2 capture. More specifically, QSPR classifiers have been developed that can, in a fraction of a section, identify candidate MOFs with enhanced CO2 adsorption capacity (>1 mmol/g at 0.15 bar and >4 mmol/g at 1 bar). The models were tested on a large set of 292 050 MOFs that were not part of the training set. The QSPR classifier could recover 945 of the top 1000 MOFs in the test set while flagging only 10% of the whole library for compute intensive screening. Thus, using the machine learning classifiers as part of a high-throughput screening protocol would result in an order of magnitude reduction in compute time and allow intractably large structure libraries and search spaces to be screened.