Polymers Crystallize into Zeolite-Like Structures

摘要

The advent of the first synthetic zeolite — a 3D crystalline network composed of metal oxides — opened up a playground of sorts for scientists to manipulate the basic building blocks of the zeolite to design new materials with tailored properties. The zeolites that have been developed since then. each with its own pattern of pores, channels, and cages, have found use in a range of applications, with particular success in the chemical and petroleum industries as molecular sieves for catalysis and separation processes. Beyond aluminum oxide (A104) and silicon oxide (Si04), which are the building blocks of zeolites, ordered materials have been fabricated from other chemistries. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), for instance, combine inorganic and organic molecules into a crystalline network with well-defined pores. Since their discovery in the 1950s, thousands of different MOF structures have been reported. Extending this concept to all-organic materials would be the logical next step.