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Zuag's Project Page |
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Intern: Zuag Yang, UCSB
Mentor: Paul Forster
Faculty Supervisor: Dr. A.K. Cheetham
Department: Materials |
EXPLORATORY SYNTHESIS OF TRANSITION METALS WITH MONOCARBOXYLATES
An interest in hybrid inorganic-organic materials results from their ability to combine transition metals with organic ligands. The main synthetic strategy used by many groups to produce porous versions of these compounds is to replace a mono-functional organic molecule with a rigid, multi-functional organic molecule. Carboxylates, in particular, have yielded highly porous materials with potentially useful properties such as gas adsorption, chiral catalysis, and magnetically ordered porous materials. While materials made with rigid multi-functional carboxylate molecules may have large cavities and high surface areas, the inflexibility of the organic acid normally leads to isolated clusters of metal atoms. We know that flexible dicarboxylic acids, with proper synthetic conditions, allow the synthesis coordination polymers with multidimensional metal ˆ oxygen ˆ metal (M ˆ O ˆ M) connectivity. If the ability of flexible dicarboxylic acids to supply oxygen atoms where they are needed in an inorganic backbone is what leads to such structures, then monocarboxylic acids, under similar synthetic conditions, should also form frameworks with extended metal oxygen networks. We have successfully used this idea to synthesize a family of transitional metal monocarboxylates using mild hydrothermal conditions, with open framework architectures and multi-dimensional M ˆ O ˆ M connectivity. The successful synthesis of new transition metal monocarboxylates offers compelling evidence for our hypothesis that such frameworks are favored by mild, hydrothermal synthetic conditions and carboxylate moieties with the ability to decorate an energetically stable metal oxygen backbone.
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