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Project

Synthesis of novel large-pore MOFs as tunable catalytic nanoreactor.

Everybody today has heard about the increasing need of having cheap, environmentally sustainable and green processes. The world is full of these high-sounding and fancy terms, but how to achieve them in practice? There are several ways to improve a chemical process, but most often studies are based on catalysts: the "accelerators" of chemical reactions. Catalysts are expensive, suffer from low stability and are difficult to separate/reuse, but their role is vital for pharmaceutical, agro and fine chemical industries. The immobilization of the catalysts on a support can solve all the mentioned problems. We propose a scaffold which has never been used before: Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs). MOFs are networks made by ion metals and rigid linkers. Under appropriate conditions these two parts can assemble a porous material on which we can immobilize the catalysts, making possible their recovery/reuse at the end of the process. The advantages of our scaffolds are immense: uniform, reproducible and controllable manufacture and the possibility to completely engineer the linkers. As a consequence, we can control the whole network structure: we can personalize it, giving new properties to the walls, and tuning the pore size. In other terms: modular haute couture, for the need of the mentioned chemical industries. If you were an industrial stakeholder, wouldn't this sound great to you?
Date:1 Nov 2019 →  31 Oct 2023
Keywords:HOMOGENEOUS CATALYSIS, GREEN TECHNOLOGIES
Disciplines:Organic chemical synthesis
Project type:Collaboration project