Hong-Cai Zhou, Dept of Chemistry, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Texas A&M University. 

Design and synthesis of porous structures with desired pore environments are essential for many energy-related industrial applications, including separation, storage, sensing, and catalysis. From a perspective of synthetic chemistry, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are regarded as a series of crystalline porous structures that are highly tunable over their components and pore spaces. In addition, the presence of labile or reactive sites, including labile coordination bonds and dynamic covalent bonds, enables researchers to precisely tune the pore environments for guest recognition and capture.

The Zhou group focuses on the pore engineering of MOFs, the design and synthesis ofstructures with desired individual and collective pore behaviors, which includes but not limited to the generation of various levels (microporous, nanoporous, mesoporous, and macroporous) of porosity, the creation of hierarchically porous structures, pore surface modification, pore combination, and pore partition.

The structural modification of the intrinsic cavities within MOFs results in alteration of functionality, such as selective recognition and cooperative behavior. This structure-property relationship highlights the importance of constructing pore spaces with precisely controlled sizes and functionalities for various chemical processes. The pore engineering methods are expected to be applicable to diverse MOFs, which shall provide essential guidance on synthesizing increasingly complex materials for various practical applications, especially for catalysis and biomedical applications.

The seminar will cover synsthetic methods that have been developed in the Zhou lab such as “bridging-ligand substitution”, “ligand-fragment co-assembly”, “kinetic analysis and tuning”, “linker installation”, “linker labilization”, “cluster and linker metalation”, “linker migration”, “domino lattice rearrangement”, and “retrosynthetic design”.

Hosted by: Joshua Yuan