Reticular chemistry is currently a massive field: millions of new MOFs can still be made, and chemists are behaving a little like children in a candy shop.
One attractive idea is using MOFs to do what enzymes do when they speed up chemical reactions, a process called catalysis, which can help synthesise useful chemicals, such as in drug development. We have MOFs that can do what enzymes can do, but they could last and work for longer than enzymes. This is ripe to be exploited for biological applications, for therapeutics, in the next decade or so.
But I think the next-best use cases will come from “multivariate materials”, which is research that you don’t hear much about because it is only going on in my lab. Here, we want to make MOFs that don’t have the same structure through and through, but have massively different environments within them.
We can make them from different modules that are “decorated” with different compounds, so inside the material, there would be very different microenvironments that would make specific molecules do specific things. In experiments, we have already been able to leverage this to make materials that absorb gases more selectively and efficiently.
This is also a shift in chemists’ mindsets. Chemists are not used to thinking about making heterogeneous or uneven materials, but we want a very ordered skeleton for a material combined with very heterogeneous guts.
I wonder if MOFs could help increase the capacities of supercapacitors?
Capacitors store charged particles. Electrons. MOFs are useful for storing molecules as far as I know, not electrons.
The reason I ask is because part of the math that tells you how much charge a capacitor can hold is based off of how large the plate for the capacitor is. And if you can stuff a football field worth of plate into a very small package, then it seems like to my layman understanding that you could make very powerful capacitors with this material, assuming it was capable of holding electrons.
I would say MOFs could be useful for batteries, but not for storing electrons directly. Why? Electrons are really small and mobile. Charged ions like in positively charged Lithium-Ions are very heavy and big by comparison.
Once again, this is going back to my laymen understanding, but since all matter, except for very rare special matter, has electrons, then it really just depends on what kind of material the MOFs fall under, which, if they were metallic or metal-like, then they might be capable of holding electrons in the right position to make new caoacitors with.
I hope somebody investigates it, and that it turns out that it works, and that we have new ultra capacitors to add to the new solid state battery technology in the next few years and the world looks a little bit brighter.
