Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Nature and Tunability of Enhanced Hydrogen Binding in Metal−Organic Frameworks with Exposed Transition Metal Sites

Published

Author(s)

Wei Zhou, Taner N. Yildirim

Abstract

Metal−organic framework (MOF) compounds with exposed transition-metal (TM) sites were recently found to exhibit significantly larger experimental heats of adsorption of H2 than classical MOFs, thus attracting greater attention. Here we show that the hydrogen binding in Mn4Cl−MOF is not of the expected Kubas type because there is (a) no significant charge transfer from TM to H2, (b) no evidence of any H2-σ* Mn-d orbital hybridization, (c) no significant H−H bond elongation, and (d) no significant shift in H−H stretching mode frequency. We make predictions for the magnetic superexchange interactions in Mn4Cl−MOF and determined low- and high-spin states of the Mn ion as local minima with very different hydrogen binding energies. We show that, by replacing Cl with F or Br, one can tune the H2 binding energy. We further reveal that the major contribution to the overall binding comes from the classical Coulomb interaction which is not screened due to the open-metal site and explains the relatively high binding energies and short H2−TM distances observed in MOFs with exposed metal sites compared to traditional ones. Finally, we show that the orientation of H2 has a surprisingly large effect on the binding potential, reducing the classical binding energy by almost 30%.
Citation
Journal of Physical Chemistry C
Volume
112
Issue
22

Keywords

adsorption, hydrogen storage, metal-organic frameworks

Citation

Zhou, W. and Yildirim, T. (2008), Nature and Tunability of Enhanced Hydrogen Binding in Metal−Organic Frameworks with Exposed Transition Metal Sites, Journal of Physical Chemistry C, [online], https://doi.org/10.1021/jp803350y, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=610063 (Accessed May 3, 2024)
Created May 6, 2008, Updated March 18, 2024