Regulating the microporous structure by cavity-shaped molecular sieving channels
Wen He, Xuan Ding, Ali A. AL-Thuraya, Daijun Meng, Bizi Yu, Wuyueming Zhou, Yumo Fan, Yuting Zhang, Hongjun Zhang, Jiangtao Liu · 2026
Read Regulating the microporous structure by cavity-shaped molecular sieving channels by Wen He, Xuan Ding, Ali A. AL-Thuraya, Daijun Meng, Bizi Yu, Wuyueming Zhou, Yumo Fan, Yuting Zhang, Hongjun Zhang, Jiangtao Liu (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13418740.txt.
Description
He and colleagues engineered in 2026 a gas-separation membrane using a cage-shaped molecule as a molecular sieve. Membranes can split gases with far less energy than heat-based methods, but common ones let too little gas through or separate poorly. The team added cucurbituril, a ring molecule with a selective inner space, into Matrimid, a widely used commercial polymer.
With five percent cucurbituril, hydrogen flow through the membrane fell, but its purity gain over methane rose sharply. After 600 days of ageing, the hydrogen-to-methane selectivity reached more than four times its starting value. The membranes also beat the best-known performance limits for separating carbon dioxide from nitrogen and from methane. They present the design as a big step over commercial membrane materials for hydrogen purification and gas upgrading.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Wen He, Xuan Ding, Ali A. AL-Thuraya, Daijun Meng, Bizi Yu, Wuyueming Zhou, Yumo Fan, Yuting Zhang, Hongjun Zhang, Jiangtao Liu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 50 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |