Temperature responsive channel uniformity impacts on highly guest-selective adsorption in a porous coordination polymer

Selective adsorption, so called "molecular sieving", is one of the significant functions of porous materials because it can play an important role in separation processes to obtain highly pure gases or petroleum. One of the next outstanding challenges of porous materials is the achievement of controllable "molecular sieving" in response to external environments. Here, we show a new temperature responsive 1-dimensional porous compound (CPL-11) which changes its structural uniformity in response to ambient temperature, which gives rise to changes in the effective pore size. As a result of the structural responsiveness, the seeming adsorption properties of CPL-11 are apparently opposite to conventional porous compounds expected from thermodynamic law, resulting in a highly selective adsorption for O₂ compared to Ar. This unexpected adsorption behavior indicates that the adsorption properties can be controlled by changing the channel uniformity of a porous framework depending on the ambient temperature.