Research
Porous materials have played an important role in society for centuries. They have become more prevalent over the past two decades given the advent of designer materials. Novel porous solids have gained considerable recent attention for applications related to small molecules, such as storage, separation, and activation. The Bloch Group is working on developing tunable molecular adsorbents based on coordination cages for small molecule storage. We design, synthesize, and characterize novel porous coordination cages for their use as both solid and liquid adsorbents with tailorable functionalities. The materials proposed here will address long-standing shortfalls for adsorptive gas storage and significantly advance the field of network solids by serving as soluble, characterizable metal-organic framework analogs.
Metal-organic frameworks are currently among the most widely studied porous materials with potential applications in catalysis, gas storage, gas separation, and conductivity. This project seeks to develop porous liquids based on this promising new class of materials. Room temperature ionic liquids based on porous ionic clusters and neat liquids composed of surface functionalized particles are under investigation. Ultimately, these materials will be advantageous over current porous materials in terms of volumetric capacity, tunability, processability, and thermal, electrical, and ionic conductivity.