Hydrogen-bonding-driven self-assembly nonporous adaptive crystals for the separation of benzene from BTX and cyclohexane

Benzene is a volatile organic compound that can seriously harm human health, while it can serve as a precursor to produce chemicals of more complex structures in chemical industry. Capturing benzene using adsorbents is of great importance for human health, when the separation of hydrocarbons including benzene from crude oil was referred to as one of the “seven chemical separations to change the world”. In this work, we reported the efficient and selective separation of benzene from BTX and cyclohexane by hydrogen bonding self-assembly nonporous adaptive crystals AdaOH for the first time under mild and user-friendly conditions. Separation of benzene and cyclohexane (v/v = 1:1) can be achieved by AdaOH with a purity of benzene up to 96.8%. Separation of BTX (v/v; benzene:toluene: o -xylene: m -xylene: p -xylene= 1:1:1:1:1) can be achieved by AdaOH with a purity of benzene increased from 20% to 82.9%. Our results suggest that separation of benzene using the activated AdaOH as a non-porous adaptive crystal for selectively and efficiently capturing benzene can solve the challenge in separation of benzene from other chemicals such as cyclohexane in chemical industry, and can be helpful for removal of benzene that is released from the vehicles to air. The advantages of commercially availability, easy preparation, high separation efficiency and selectivity for benzene might endow this material with enormous potential for practical uses in areas like petrochemical industry.