The processes currently employed for the separation of the chemical compounds required by our modern economy are responsible for a significant portion of our society's energy demands. A great deal of scientific effort is currently directed toward trying to minimize these demands by developing new sponge-like materials that can be employed in these separations, broadly via selective absorption of chemical compounds into the available pores. The funded project seeks to develop a novel class of relatively simple sponge-like solids, those that possess individual cavities as opposed to interconnected pores. The work is expected to advance our understanding of chemical confinement and permeability in molecular solids with broader implications in materials and separations science and green chemistry. The project will support the education of our next generation of materials scientists and will provide internship opportunities for promising, low-income high school students in the DC metro area.
Microporous materials find a host of applications in industrial settings and open-pore structures, wherein pores are interconnected in one, two, or three dimensions, are the targets of much contemporary research in this area. The funded project will study and develop intrinsically zero dimensionally (0D) porous molecular solids in the context of the seemingly broad misconception that the pores of such materials are inactive as sorbents. The project aims to: i) conduct fundamental studies toward the understanding the factors that govern sorption/desorption kinetics (and thermodynamics) in 0D porous molecular solids, seeking to understand the influence of structure, atomic motion and disorder, sorbate affinity, sorbate properties, and defect density, on crystal permeability, ii) develop novel materials and methods for enhanced exchange in 0D porous molecular solids, seeking to expand the functionality of 0D porous materials such that they may be on par with traditional open-pore materials for chemical separations, and iii) exploit the confinement properties of certain 0D porous molecular solids for novel science and applications (e.g., the stabilization of reactive species, or storage of volatiles).
