Chemists Develop Highly Porous Material, More Precious Than Diamonds – ScienceDaily



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Porosity is the key to high performance materials for energy storage systems, environmental technologies or catalysts: the more porous a solid state material is, the more liquid and liquid it can store. gases. However, a multitude of pores destabilize the material. In search of the stability limits of such frameworks, researchers at the Faculty of Chemistry at the Technical University of Dresden broke a world record: the DUT-60 is a new crystalline framework with the most specific surface area highest in the world and the largest pore volume (5.02 cm3g) measured up to now among all known crystalline structure materials.

The specific surface describes the sum of all the surface boundaries of a material: the outer visible areas as well as the inner pores. 90.3% of the DUT-60 is a free volume. The organometallic framework (MOF) can absorb huge amounts of gas, allowing it to store huge amounts of gas or to filter out toxic gases in the air. "Materials with such a high surface area could lead to new and unexpected phenomena," explains Stefan Kaskel, professor of inorganic chemistry at TU Dresden, the importance of the new material for science. "If you imagine that the inner surface of a gram of zeolite is a flat, flat surface, it would cover about 800 square meters, the graphene could reach nearly 3,000 square meters." One gram of DUT-60 would reach a surface of 7800 square meters. "

The material was developed by computer methods and synthesized thereafter. Few low density compounds are sufficiently mechanically stable to be accessible to gases without their surfaces being destroyed. "It took us five years to move from IT development to the pure DUT-60 product," says Professor Kaskel. "Because of its very complicated production, the material is more expensive than gold and diamonds and so far it can only be synthesized in small amounts of up to 50 milligrams per batch." The former world record was held by NU-110 material published by Omar Farha, Northwestern University, in 2012: its pore volume of 4.40 cm3/ g is significantly lower than the new record holder. DUT-60 marks a milestone in the study of upper porosity limits in crystalline porous materials and stimulates the development of new methods for determining internal surfaces.

Within the DFG FOR2433 research unit, Prof. Kaskel and his partners are working intensively to produce new porous materials that can dynamically modify their structures and adjust their pore sizes adaptively. "In addition, we are working on applications of porous materials in the fields of gas storage, environmental research, catalysis, batteries and air filtration." Here, in Dresden, we also produce organic metal frames on the scale of several kilograms.You can order them at the "Materials Center Dresden".

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Material provided by Technische Universität Dresden. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.

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