Crystalline Porous Materials

Separation of small gas molecules is challenging; functional crystalline materials with its ordered pores offer an existing opportunity towards these applications. Imparting functionality, such as controlled flexibility to alter pore opening via external stimuli, ion regulated gating, to these materials improves their applicability. Ionic covalent organic frameworks with temperature regulated linker oscillations to adjust pore sizes have shown size selective molecular recognition capabilities with unprecedented resolution of less than 0.2 Å. Na+ gated nano-channels have shown to conduct polar molecules like water and ammonia and they can be fabricated into membranes to remove by-product water from carbon up-cycling reactions and for ammonia separation in Haber-Bosch process.