Hybrid Porous Nanomaterials

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Composite materials constructed from more than one type of building block can exhibit transformative, additive and emergent properties. Such properties depend not only on compositional makeup but also on internal structuring across multiple length-scales. This is particularly critical when working with nanoparticle (NP) building blocks, because their remarkable properties intrinsically depend on size, dimensionality and mutual arrangement. Therefore, the bottom-up assembly of nanoparticle building blocks is highly desirable for constructing new materials. Yet, materials constructed from more than one class of nanoparticle are rare, because we still lack general methods for interfacing and precisely arranging chemically distinct nanoscale components.Porous materials are critical for current and future technologies alike - from catalysis and gas separation to drug delivery or next-generation batteries. Reticular design has revolutionised the construction of porous materials with highly ordered internal crystal structures. Yet, it is virtually impossible to produce a porous material displaying more than one internal structure, or to integrate porosity with other types of building block. Recently, porous nanoparticles have emerged, which now allows us to consider a whole new class of materials that combine porous units with other nanoscale building blocks.This project will extend the concept of dynamic covalent nanoparticles - previously developed on pseudo-spherical metal cores - to porous metal-organic framework (MOF) NPs. Metal NPs and MOF NPs will be developed to have complementary physicochemical properties. On-NP physical-organic studies will establish structure-reactivity relationships for NP-bound reactions. The arising understanding will then be exploited to construct hybrid materials composed of nano-sized MOF and metal building blocks linked by specific dynamic molecular linkers. The resulting materials will be endowed with hierarchical structural control and adaptive behaviours that are characteristic of the underlying dynamic molecular links.