Science Daily March 19, 2024 Mesoporous metal oxides exhibit excellent physicochemical properties and are widely used in various fields, including energy storage/conversion, catalysis, and sensors. Although several soft-template approaches are reported, high-temperature calcination for both metal oxide formation and template removal is necessary, which limits direct synthesis on a plastic substrate for flexible devices. Researchers in South Korea developed a universal synthetic approach that combines thermal activation and oxygen plasma to synthesize diverse mesoporous metal oxides (V2O5, V6O13, TiO2, Nb2O5, WO3, and MoO3) at low temperatures (150–200 °C), which could be applied to a flexible polymeric substrate. To demonstrate their […]
Tag Archives: MOFs
New ionic MOF materials boost hydrogen fuel cell efficiency
Nanowerk September 11, 2023 A few MOFs which typically use strong acids as proton sources, display superprotonic conductivity. However, they are rare due to the instability of MOFs in highly acidic conditions. Researchers in South Korea have shown superprotonic conductivity using a moderately acidic guest, zwitterionic sulfamic acid (HSA), which was encapsulated in MOF-808 and MIL-101. HSA acted not only as a proton source but also as a proton-conducting medium due to its extensive hydrogen bonding ability and zwitterion effect. A new sustained concentration gradient method resulted in higher HSA encapsulation compared to conventional methods. The MOFs showed impressive superprotonic […]
Getting it to stick: Designing optimal core-shell MOFs for direct air capture
Phys.org October 11, 2022 MOFs utilize porous membranes to capture large volumes of gasses and can be designed via computational modeling rather than traditional trial-and-error. However, adsorbents designed to strongly bind CO2 nearly always bind H2O strongly. A team of researchers in the US (University of Pittsburgh, DOE) has a direct air capture (DAC) strategy to remove carbon dioxide from the air using core–shell MOF design, where a high-CO2-capacity MOF “core” is protected from competitive H2O-binding via a MOF “shell” that has very slow water diffusion. They considered a high-frequency adsorption/desorption cycle that regenerates the adsorbents before water can pass […]