Porous solid materials have proven indispensable in numerous carbon-sequestration and gas purification and storage applications. However, the solid nature of these materials restricts their processability, and in many cases liquid phase materials would be more amendable to both short and long-term real-world storage and transportation applications. Recently, a new class of materials was introduced that had both the properties of fluidity as well as permanent nano-porosity. Known as <i>porous liquids</i>, the materials have great potential to transform many diverse fields, but only a handful of these materials have been realized to date, including a few examples of small organic cage-like molecules, functionalized hollow-silica particles, and metal organic frameworks or zeolites suspended in bulky ionic solvents. Here, we describe an approach to functionalize the outer shell of covalent organic framework (COF) particles with tethered ionic liquids and/or liquid polymer chains using click chemistry. The functionalized COFs are then suspended in a bulky ionic liquid solvent that is size-excluded from entering the COF pore. The approach effectively introduces unoccupied pores into a liquid, thereby heralding a whole new class of highly tunable organic porous liquid materials to the field. A series of boronate ester-linked COFs of different pore-sizes are investigated with several different sizes of ionic liquids, and the relative propensity of these materials to uptake various gasses are discussed.

Porous liquid covalent organic frameworks

2019 Spring National Meeting

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