Breaking the -162°C Temperature Barrier! UNIST Develops New Material for High-Temperature Separation of Fusion Fuel

UNIST, Helmholtz Research Center, and Soongsil University Develop MOF for Deuterium Separation at -153°C
Operates Above Natural Gas Liquefaction Point (-162°C), Enabling Use in LNG Facilities; Published in Nature Communications

A material capable of separating deuterium at -153°C has been developed.

This temperature exceeds the liquefaction point of natural gas, considered the commercialization threshold, by more than 10°C (natural gas liquefies at -162°C). This opens the way for economically producing deuterium using existing liquefied natural gas (LNG) production pipelines.

The team led by Professor Oh Hyuncheol of the Department of Chemistry at UNIST, in collaboration with the Helmholtz Research Center in Germany and Professor Kim Jaheon’s team at Soongsil University, announced on the 20th that they have developed a porous material capable of separating deuterium from hydrogen at -153°C.

Research team. (From the bottom left, counterclockwise) Professor Oh Hyunchul, Researcher Park Jaewoo (co-first author), Dr. Jung Minji (co-first author), Researcher Lee Jungwon, Researcher Park Taewoong, Researcher Jung Sungyup. Provided by UNIST

Deuterium is a next-generation nuclear fusion fuel and its demand is rapidly increasing in fields such as semiconductor processing, but it is difficult and expensive to produce. This is because deuterium and regular hydrogen have similar physical and chemical properties, requiring separation through an extreme cryogenic distillation process at -253°C. Although research is underway to separate deuterium using the pores of a porous material called a metal-organic framework (MOF), these materials also suffer from decreased performance as temperature increases.

The developed copper-based MOF maintained its deuterium separation performance at -153°C, unlike typical MOFs. Conventional MOFs perform well at -250°C but their performance drops sharply around -193°C.

The research team was the first to identify that this material’s performance is due to the expansion of the framework lattice as temperature increases. The pores of the developed MOF are smaller than the size of hydrogen molecules at cryogenic temperatures, preventing gas passage, but as the temperature rises, the framework lattice expands, enlarging the pore size.

As the pores expand, gas begins to pass through, and hydrogen and deuterium are separated by the quantum sieving effect. The quantum sieving effect refers to the phenomenon where heavier elements pass through pores more quickly at low temperatures.

Real-time X-ray diffraction and neutron scattering experiments confirmed that the framework actually expands as the temperature rises. Thermal desorption analysis conducted at increasing temperatures also showed that deuterium could be stably separated at higher temperatures.

Professor Oh Hyuncheol explained, “The newly developed material consumes much less energy and has higher separation efficiency compared to conventional ultra-cryogenic distillation methods. Since its operating temperature exceeds the condensation point of natural gas, it can be directly integrated into existing LNG production facilities, offering significant industrial impact.”

Hydrogen isotope separation mechanism achieved through MOF lattice expansion caused by temperature increase.

This research was jointly led by Dr. Margarita Russina of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy as a corresponding author, with Jung Minji and Park Jaewoo from UNIST as co-first authors.

The research results were published in the world-renowned international journal Nature Communications on February 27.

The study was supported by the Mid-career Researcher Program and the Overseas Large-scale Research Facility Utilization Support Program funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

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