Porous coordination polymers, including metal-organic frameworks, hold incredible potential to impact numerous technologies. The wide breath of applications include charge and ion transport membranes, separation membranes, hydrogen and natural gas storage, drug delivery, sensors, ‘self-cleaning’ surfaces, etc. However, the current technological impact of these materials is muted due to the lack of understanding of fundamental theories behind MOF crystallization and formation. Many potential applications require MOFs to be created as thin films, such as membranes for batteries and fuel cells, separation membranes etc., since increased thickness creates barriers to mass and charge transfer.<br/>We will show that the investigation of MOF crystallization, guided by a combination of chemistry, fluid dynamics, and crystallization theories, will allow us to discover new design rules to create rapid, uniform and high quality MOF crystals, thin films and composites. Using evaporative crystallization during flow coating, large area, pinhole-free thin films of multiple prototypical MOFs can be created. MOF formation can be controlled and tuned to create novel composites with polymers for drug delivery applications. Finally, a combination of in-situ grazing incidence X-ray scattering and diffraction combined with reaction kinetics modeling will be used to explain the intricacies of MOF crystallization. We show that MOF thin film nucleation occurs in two steps, first with the formation of an amorphous scattering cluster which is then followed by crystallization.

Understanding and guiding the formation of metal organic frameworks and polymer composites

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.