Polymerized MOF Beads for CWAs

With potential use by military and terrorist organizations, a wide range of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) such as sarin and mustard gas as well as a number of toxic industrial chemicals (TICs) continue to represent a significant threat to life because of their high availability and toxicity. Current military chemical–biological (CB) suits use activated carbon as the primary protective barrier layer or adsorbent against CWAs as well as a wide variety of TICs. The carbon layer, although often a good adsorbent and effective against CWAs, does not act as a reactive layer and is thus not an efficient CWA detoxifier. To improve the overall performance of the suits and ultimately operator safety, there is a desire to integrate a reactive component into the personal protective equipment (PPE). This mitigates the hazard and actively decomposes, or detoxifies, the wide range of CWAs and TICs that can be experienced by the soldier. A range of metal-organic framework (MOF) materials have shown great promise both as an effective adsorbent and, more importantly, as a rapid and efficient means of catalyzing the detoxification or destruction of the harmful chemical agents. However, incorporation of the MOFs into PPE represents a significant challenge because of their inherently small, often submicron, size and tendency to be deactivated as they are fabricated into large active particles or beads. We have demonstrated and scaled an approach for the fabrication of high porosity, low pressure drop, high stability MOF beads that allow the full activity of the MOF to be realized in a range of PPE applications.