Researchers from Northwestern University have engineered two new synthetic materials that have broken all existing records in terms of surface area.
The materials which are labeled as NU-109 and NU-110 are part of a category of materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). MOFs comprise crystalline nanostructures and exhibit the potential to store natural gas for sustainable materials chemistry like catalysts and vehicles.
The potential of the newly synthesized materials is locked in their immense surface area. One NU-110 crystal is the size of a grain of salt. If the internal surface area of one such crystal grain could be stretched out, the surface area of the unfolded material is big enough to cover a desktop. This means that the internal surface area corresponding to one gram of NU-110 when spread out would be equivalent to the area of one-and-a-half football fields.
The research team was led by research associate professor of chemistry, Omar Farha from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The researchers engineered, simulated and studied the characteristics of the two new MOFs and employed Brunauer-Emmett-Teller, or BET to measure the surface areas of the materials. The two MOFs demonstrated the highest surface area recorded for a porous material at 7,000 m2/g. This translates as 7 km2 of surface area from 1 kg of the material. The team employed a carbon dioxide activation technique to access the vast surface area which under normal circumstances is inaccessible owing to solvent molecules remaining confined to the pores. Heating can be used to remove the solvent but it also damages the MOFs. The carbon dioxide technique overcomes this limitation.
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