Subscribe free to our newsletters via your
. 24/7 Space News .




TECH SPACE
A New Way to Create Porous Materials
by Colin Poitras for UC News
Storrs CT (SPX) Feb 26, 2014


Altug Poyraz, left, a graduate student, with Steven Suib, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and director, GEMS Center of Excellence. Image courtesy Peter Morenus/UConn Photo.

A team of UConn chemists has discovered a new way of making a class of porous materials that allows for greater manufacturing controls and has significantly broader applications than the longtime industry standard.

The process, more than three years in the making and outlined in the December 2013 edition of Nature Communications, has resulted in the creation of more than 60 new families of materials so far, with the potential for many more. The key catalyst in the process is recyclable, making it a 'green' technology.

Four patent applications related to the discovery are pending. VeruTEK, a chemical innovations company based in South Windsor, Conn., has secured rights to some of the materials.

"This is definitely the most exciting project I've been involved in over the past 30 years," says Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Steven L. Suib, the project's principal investigator. "What we've done is similar to discovering a new insect, only now there is a series of families of these things that can be discovered. That's pretty cool."

The research is the first major work to come out of the University's new GEMS Center of Excellence. The center, which gets its name from the acronym Green Emulsions, Micelles and Surfactants, is located in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Suib's research involves the creation of uniform, or monomodal, mesoporous metal oxides using transition metals such as manganese, cobalt, and iron. Mesoporous describes the size of the pores in the material. In this case, they are between 2 and 50 nanometers in diameter and are evenly distributed across the material's surface, similar to what one might see if a pin is used to poke numerous holes in a material.

Only the UConn process allows scientists to use nitric oxide chemistry to change the diameter of the "pin," in order to change the size of the holes. This unique approach helps contain chemical reactions and provides unprecedented control and flexibility.

"Professor Suib and his colleagues report an unexpected and novel route to generation of mesoporous metal oxides," says Prabir Dutta, distinguished university professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

"Professor Suib's discovery and the extension of mesoporosity to a much broader range of metal oxides is bound to push this area to new heights, with all sorts of potential applications, making this study a most important development in materials science."

Having materials with uniform microscopic pores allows targeted molecules of a particular size to flow into and out of the material, which is important in such applications as adsorption, sensors, optics, magnetic, and energy products such as the catalysts found in fuel cells.

"When people think about these materials, they think about lock-and-key systems," says Suib. "With certain enzymes, you have to have pores of a certain size and shape. With this process, you can now make a receptacle for specific proteins or enzymes so that they can enter the pores and specifically bind and react. That's the hope, to be able to make a pore that will allow such materials to fit, to be able to make a pore that a scientist needs."

For the past 20 years, scientists have relied on a long-standing, water-based procedure for making mesoporous materials that was first developed by Mobil Oil. That procedure, although groundbreaking when it was discovered, has limitations.

The size of the pores in the material is difficult to manipulate; the walls of the resulting mesoporous structures are amorphous; and the stability of the underlying system weakens when exposed to high heat, limiting its use. The process also only works best when using silicon or titanium, as opposed to other metals of the periodic table.

UConn's chemists took another route, choosing to replace the water-based process with a synthetic chemical surfactant similar to a detergent to create the mesopores. By reducing the use of water, adding the surfactant, then subjecting the resulting nanoparticles to heat, the research team found that it could generate thermally-controlled, thermally-stable, uniform mesoporous materials with very strong crystalline walls.

The mesopores, Suib says, are created by the gaps that are formed between the organized nanoparticles when they cluster together. The team found that the size of those gaps or pores could be tailored - increased or decreased - by adjusting the nanostructure's exposure to heat, a major advancement in the synthesis process.

"Such control of pore-size distribution, enhanced pore volumes, and thermal stabilities is unprecedented ...," the team wrote in its report.

Perhaps just as importantly, the team found that the process could be successfully applied to a wide variety of elements of the periodic table. Also, the surfactant used in the synthesis is recyclable and can be reused after it is extracted with no harm to the final product.

Aware of the significance of its findings, Suib's team deliberately waited to publish its report until it had verified different applications using a variety of periodic elements. Even now, the team believes it has only scratched the surface.

"We developed more than 60 families of materials," says Suib. "For every single material we made, you can make dozens of others like it. You can dope them by adding small amounts of impurities. You can alter their properties. You can make sulfides in addition to oxides. There is a lot more research that needs to be done."

The UConn research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Basic Energy Sciences division through a $420,000 grant over three years. Suib says one particular member of the research team, Altug S. Poyraz, an 'enormously talented' graduate student pursuing his doctoral degree at UConn, was instrumental to the project's success. Poyraz spent countless weeks patiently exploring different approaches to the process until the team found success.

"He's truly a unique grad student and probably the best synthetic chemist I've ever seen," said Suib, who also serves as director of UConn's Institute of Materials Science.

Suib believes the process will be attractive to industry because it is simple, cost-effective, and green.

.


Related Links
University of Connecticut
Space Technology News - Applications and Research






Comment on this article via your Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail login.

Share this article via these popular social media networks
del.icio.usdel.icio.us DiggDigg RedditReddit GoogleGoogle








TECH SPACE
UT Dallas-led team makes powerful muscles from fishing line and sewing thread
Dallas TX (SPX) Feb 26, 2014
An international team led by The University of Texas at Dallas has discovered that ordinary fishing line and sewing thread can be cheaply converted to powerful artificial muscles. The new muscles can lift a hundred times more weight and generate a hundred times higher mechanical power than the same length and weight of human muscle. Per weight, they can generate 7.1 horsepower per kilogram ... read more


TECH SPACE
China Focus: Uneasy rest begins for China's troubled Yutu rover

Is Yutu Stuck?

Japan's Pocari Sweat bound for the moon: maker

Lunar ownership laws: a future necessity?

TECH SPACE
NASA Mars Orbiter Views Opportunity Rover on Ridge

Curiosity Adds Reverse Driving for Wheel Protection

Curiosity Drives On After Crossing Martian Dune

The World Above and Beyond

TECH SPACE
DARPA Open Catalog Makes Agency-Sponsored Software and Publications Available to All

Orion Underway Recovery Testing Begins off the Coast of California

Inside astronaut Alexander's head

NASA Welcomes University Participants to Develop Science Payloads

TECH SPACE
No Call for Yutu

What's up, Yutu

China's Jade Rabbit rover comes 'back to life'

Yutu Awakes

TECH SPACE
Space suit leak happened before, NASA admits

NASA Seeks US Industry Feedback on Options for Future ISS Cargo Services

NASA, International Space Station Partners Announce Future Crew Members

Andrews Space Cargo Module Power Unit Provides Power For Payloads Bound For ISS

TECH SPACE
'Mission of Firsts' Showcased New Range-Safety Technology at NASA Wallops

First Copernicus satellite at launch site

Arianespace to launch OPTSAT 3000 and VENuS satellites

Lighter engines a headache for satellite launcher Ariane

TECH SPACE
NASA cries planetary 'bonanza' with 715 new worlds

Detection of Water Vapor in the Atmosphere of a Hot Jupiter

ESA selects planet-hunting PLATO mission

Rife with hype, exoplanet study needs patience and refinement

TECH SPACE
EIAST showcases DubaiSat-2 results, plans for KhalifaSat at space conference in Singapore

A New Way to Create Porous Materials

USAF reveals 'neighborhood watch' satellite program

UT Dallas-led team makes powerful muscles from fishing line and sewing thread




The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2014 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement All images and articles appearing on Space Media Network have been edited or digitally altered in some way. Any requests to remove copyright material will be acted upon in a timely and appropriate manner. Any attempt to extort money from Space Media Network will be ignored and reported to Australian Law Enforcement Agencies as a potential case of financial fraud involving the use of a telephonic carriage device or postal service.