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Glad to share our new paper, a perspective published @J_A_C_S, about shaping #MOFs for high-density gas storage, including #monoliths https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.0c00270#.XqFHA1xAMZI.twitter. But - what is a MOF monolith and where is this coming from? (a thread!) @cebcambridge @Cambridge_Uni
I did my PhD developing activated carbon aerogels, shaped as single bodies https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000862230600114X - hence monoliths. These are not the typical cordierite monoliths used in industry but a fancy name for pellets.
So, these materials are not megaliths...
but rather big macrostructures of materials with very interesting properties.
I worked on these activated carbon monolithic structures, with really high densities and surface areas. Now, my first PhD student @Tian___Tian, knocked at my door one day - back to 2013! - asking for some thoughts on a glassy-look material. The 1 cm3 material was transparent,
but he had examined it with PXRD and was ZIF-8. Because of the similarities with the carbon aerogels, if the material was transparent, we knew that the packing was really good and therefore the density very high. A highly porous material with high density is good news -
you do not want high porosity and low density. (Most of the times) you want the highest surface area AND the highest density, so you can hold the highest amount of, say, hydrogen, in the smallest amount of volume.
We had a hard time convincing grant reviewers that this was a good idea (rejected @EPSRC). We tried to publish the results in a few journals until we got it https://pubs.rsc.org/no/content/articlehtml/2015/ta/c4ta05116e. We went then for one of the best MOFs ever - named HKUST-1. This is a MOF synthesised in 1999 and
still has one of the highest adsorption capacities. I always say the authors invented a time machine to 2025 (pandemic permitting) and went back to synthesise an amazing material, superior in many aspects to many current MOFs https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat5050 - BUT, it is not stable :(
so we want back to one of the most stable MOFs, called UiO-66. It was *easy* to create a monolith but it was *difficult* to get a high density - again, just looking at the structure, one will know if the density is high. Is it transparent? You got it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10185-1
We are now having an amazing collection of monolithic materials thanks to multiple collaborations, including @Josilves @MMCLabOx @ThomasDBennett
@wuttkescience @GDivitini @MoghadamPeyman
and many others!
@wuttkescience @GDivitini @MoghadamPeyman
and many others!
Something very important I forgot to say - if a material or piece of science is beautiful, it must be good. And, these monoliths, ARE BEAUTIFUL!
