A class of materials called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs, has attracted considerable interest over the last several years for a variety of potential energy-related applications — especially since researchers discovered that these typically insulating materials could also be made electrically conductive.
A class of materials called metal organic frameworks, or MOFs, has attracted considerable interest over the last several years for a variety of potential energy-related applications — especially since researchers discovered that these typically insulating materials could also be made electrically conductive.
Thanks to MOFs’ extraordinary combination of porosity and conductivity, this finding opened the possibility of new applications in batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors, electrocatalysts, and specialized chemical sensors. But the process of developing specific MOF materials that possess the desired characteristics has been slow. That’s largely because it’s been hard to figure out their exact molecular structure and how it influences the material’s properties.
Now, researchers at MIT and other institutions have found a way to control the growth of crystals of several kinds of MOFs. This made it possible to produce crystals large enough to be probed by a battery of tests, enabling the team to finally decode the structure of these materials, which resemble the two-dimensional hexagonal lattices of materials like graphene.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: Researchers at MIT and other institutions have found a way to stabilize the growth of crystals of several kinds of metal organic frameworks, or MOFs. This image shows two scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs of Cu3HHTT2 and Co6HHTT3 that can be isolated on-demand with either rod- or plate-like (inset) morphology by varying the synthetic conditions. Credits: Courtesy of the researchers and edited by MIT News
