Crystal Growth of Nanoporous Materials

我们建议对晶体生长的理解和开放框架纳米多孔材料的合理设计进行最基本、最雄心勃勃、最协调的多学科研究。我们相信这项研究的发现将标志着我们对晶体生长的理解以及我们利用我们的理解生产具有独特性能和应用的新材料的能力的重大飞跃。人们对多孔材料的合成进行了广泛的研究。然而，这种合成工作的大部分主要目的是(i)发现新结构，（ii）修改或改进现有材料，或（iii）开发工艺以使这些材料能够成功地大规模生产。迄今为止，在合成和结晶机制方面的努力取得了许多积极的成果，但也有许多未解决的问题，例如：(i)成核的详细机制；（ii）生长物种的身份；（iii）纳米晶体的生长是通过加成还是聚集发生的。本研究涉及应用一套强大的互补技术来研究开放框架材料的晶体生长，包括：原子力显微镜，高分辨率透射和扫描电子显微镜，增强数据处理的原位核磁共振，x射线衍射和质谱。更好地了解合成过程可能会产生重要的经济效益，例如，更好的过程控制，提高试剂使用效率，改进再现性以及为特定应用修改或定制产品的能力。也许最重要的是能够确定成功的合成路线，以获得迄今未知的结构和成分，这些结构和成分已在理论基础上预测具有有益的特性。这一向初级理解的新水平迈进了一步，将为化学、物理（有序阵列）和生物材料的创新应用开辟道路。

We propose the most fundamental, ambitious and concerted, multi-disciplinary investigation into the understanding of crystal growth and rational design of open framework, nano-porous materials yet attempted. We believe the findings from this study will mark a major leap forward into our understanding of crystal growth and our ability to exploit our understanding to produce new materials with unique properties and applications. Extensive studies on the synthesis of porous materials have been carried out. However, the majority of this synthetic work has been aimed primarily at either (i) the discovery of new structures, (ii) modification or improvement of existing materials or (iii) process development to enable such materials to be produced successfully on a large scale. The effort so far on synthesis and crystallisation mechanism has yielded many positive results but also many unanswered questions, for example: (i) the detailed mechanism of nucleation (ii) the identity of growth species and (iii) whether nanocrystal growth occurs by addition or aggregation. This research involves the application of a powerful set of complementary techniques to the study of crystal growth of open-framework materials comprising: atomic force microscopy, high resolution transmission and scanning electron microscopies, in-situ NMR with enhanced data processing, X-ray diffraction and mass spectrometry. A substantially better understanding of the synthesis process is likely to yield important economic benefits, for example, better process control, increased efficiency in reagent usage, improved reproducibility and the capacity to modify or tailor products for specific applications. Perhaps most important of all would be the ability to identify successful synthetic routes to as-yet unknown structures and compositions which have been predicted on theoretical grounds to have beneficial characteristics. Such a step forward to a new level of primary understanding would open the way to innovative applications in chemistry, physics (ordered arrays) and biomaterials.