Seminar on MOF upscaling for Catalysis and Cooling applications

Dr David Farrusseng 

Research Professor 

Department IRCELYON, CNRS

This seminar will be chaired by A/P Li Hong.

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), particularly HKUST-1, ZIF-8 and Al-based MOFs, are promising candidates for various applications in particular, Catalysis, thermal heat management, and enhanced gas storage and separation. Unfortunately, significant challenges remain in the synthesis of these materials, particularly low yields (<90%) and the use of metal salts. This requires extensive washing, which generates large volumes of aqueous waste containing both organic compounds and salts that must be treated before disposal. The viability of such synthetic approaches at large industrial scale therefore remains questionable.

We present here an alternative, scalable route for the production of HKUST-1, ZIF-8 and Al-based MOFs that generates no waste and requires no workup steps.

For Al-bases MOF as an example, the use of aluminium alkoxides enables yields approaching 100%, with alcohols as the only co-product, which can be recovered by simple evaporation. This synthesis approach has been successfully demonstrated at the 100 kg scale for Al-fumarate [1] and MIL-160 [2]. The successful scale-up of ZIF-8 and HKUST-1 without waste generation  will be described.

The applications of Al-fumarate as a desiccant for adsorption chiller will be described. It surpasses state of the art silica-based technology by large and offer for the first time solutions for adsorption chiller operating at temperature as low as 55°C.

The application of upscaled ZIF-8 for bio-oil catalytic transesterification will be presented.

 Figure 1: Calibrated Al-fumarate grains obtained at spray-drier pilot (left) and schematic representation of the all-in-one designed synthesis process (right).

References

[1] M. Perbet, et al. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2025, 64, 12, 6541–6549

[2] M. Perbet, et al. ChemComm, Accepted article - DOI: 10.1039/D5CC03405A 

Dr. David Farrusseng got his PhD in Material Science at the European Institute of Membrane (IEM) in Montpellier (France).  He joined as post-doc the group of Prof. F. Schüth at the MPI Kofo (Germany). In 2001, he was appointed CNRS researcher in the group of Dr. C. Mirodatos for the development of High Throughput approaches and AI in Catalysis. He is currently group leader at IRCELYON department and the president of the International Association of Catalysis Societies France. His activities deal with the design of Materials for original catalytic & separation processes. He was among the pioneers in the design, synthesis up-scaling and application of MOF to Catalysis. He got many prestigious prices, among them the IACS award and the Silver award of CNRS.