The area of porous materials is extremely active given their practical applications in gas sorption, separations, and catalysis.  Our group employs simple organic building blocks that consist of ureas or amides paired with rigid spacers within macrocyclic structures.  These macrocycles self-assembled into columns that pack together to construct crystals that display type I gas adsorption isotherms with CO2 (g).  Most of our systems contain guest accessible channels with diameters of less than a nanometer.  However, several macrocycles have no internal cavity and assemble into close packed high-density structures with no obvious channels, yet they display similar type I isotherms.  These systems are part of an expanding category of non-porous organic solids that are able to expand like clays to uptake gases.  We will present examples of bis-ureas macrocycles that vary the size, shape, and interior functionality and examine their assembly and uptake of gases and guests.

Self-assembling macrocycles as a strategy for generating porous crystals

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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