Exhaled Anesthetic Xenon Regeneration by Gas Separation Using a Metal–Organic Framework with Sorbent‐Sorbate Induced‐Fit

Noble gas xenon (Xe) is an excellent anesthetic gas, but its rarity, high cost and constrained production prohibits wide use in medicine. Here, we have developed a closed-circuit anesthetic Xe recovery and reusage process with highly effective CO₂-specific adsorbent CUPMOF-5 that is promising to solve the anesthetic Xe supply problem. CUPMOF-5 possesses spacious cage cavities interconnected in four directions by confinement throat apertures of ~3.4 Å, which makes it an ideal molecular sieving of CO₂ from Xe, O₂, N₂ with the benchmark selectivity and high uptake capacity of CO₂. In situ single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD) and computational simulation solidly revealed the vital sieving role of the confined throat and the sorbent-sorbate induced-fit strengthening binding interaction to CO₂. CUPMOF-5 can remove 5 % CO₂ even from actual moist exhaled anesthetic gases, and achieves the highest Xe recovery rate (99.8 %) so far, as verified by breakthrough experiments. This endows CUPMOF-5 great potential for the on-line CO₂ removal and Xe recovery from anesthetic closed-circuits.