Developing and scaling up novel porous MOF spheres

During the past year, the HySTrAm consortium worked on the development and scale up of novel porous MOF spheres for hydrogen sorption and short-term storage.

Porous (micro)spheres (also referred to as ‘beads’) have garnered a lot of research and industrial interest in the fields of healthcare, sensors, separation, sorption, energy storage, and catalysis, owing to their exceptional properties including their high specific surface area and pore volume, low density, permeability, and stable mechanical properties.

There are several wet and dry preparation and manufacturing techniques that can be used to prepare the sorbent and catalyst bodies in various solid, hollow, or porous forms (beads, pellets, rods, multiple lobes, and the like) at a range of different scales (from several µms to several mm-sized pieces).

Vibrational droplet coagulation presents a major step for HySTrAm towards a more automated high-volume fabrication process among the current manufacturing techniques, offering a good degree of control over the formed beads with a narrow size distribution and tailored micro-porosity.

HySTrAm employs vibrational droplet coagulation as a cutting-edge granulation technique that enables the continuous production on a kg-scale at VITO of uniform beads from a highly performing MOF material manufactured by ProfMOF.