Porous materials are very promising for the development of cost- and energy-efficient separation processes, such as for the purification of ethylene from ethylene/ethane mixture—an important but currently challenging industrial process. Here we report a microporous hydrogen-bonded organic framework that takes up ethylene with very good selectivity over ethane through a gating mechanism. The material consists of tetracyano-bicarbazole building blocks held together through intermolecular CN···H–C hydrogen bonding interactions, and forms as a threefold-interpenetrated framework with pores of suitable size for the selective capture of ethylene. The hydrogen-bonded organic framework exhibits a gating mechanism in which the threshold pressure required for guest uptake varies with the temperature. Ethylene/ethane separation is validated by breakthrough experiments with high purity of ethylene (99.1%) at 333 K. Hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks are usually not robust, yet this material was stable under harsh conditions, including exposure to strong acidity, basicity and a variety of highly polar solvents.

多孔材料对于开发成本和能源效率高的分离过程非常有前途，例如从乙烯/乙烷混合物中提纯乙烯——这是一个重要但目前具有挑战性的工业过程。在这里，我们报告了一种微孔氢键有机框架，它通过门控机制以比乙烷更好的选择性吸收乙烯。该材料由通过分子间 CN···H–C 氢键相互作用结合在一起的四氰基-联咔唑结构单元组成，并形成具有适合选择性捕获乙烯的孔径大小的三重互穿框架。氢键有机骨架显示出一种门控机制，其中客体吸收所需的阈值压力随温度而变化。