The future of electronics and energy storage looks bright based on a recent innovation that allows researchers to "realize electrical conductivity in metal-organic framework (MOF) materials."
"Fundamentally, this sheds enormous light on the conduction process in these materials," Alec Talin, a material scientist at Sandia and the paper's lead author, said in a Sandia National Laboratories news release.
The new development could have a wide range of application including "chemical sensing, medical diagnostics, energy harvesting and storage and microelectronics."
The MOF materials are porous and contain crystalline structures that have been described as resembling "molecular scaffolding." The scaffolding is made up of organic molecules glued together by metal ions. The combination creates a unique substance with qualities such as "nanoporosity, ultrahigh surface areas and remarkable thermal stability," the news release reported. This material could allow for an effective, low-cost semiconductor.
"When you imagine the 'Tinkertoys' we played with as children, you recall they are essentially wooden balls with holes that you can link together with sticks," Sandia senior scientist Mark Allendorf said in the news release "MOFs work the same way, only you substitute metal ions for the balls and organic molecules for the sticks."
The gaps between the "scaffolding" can be filled with foreign molecules, which gave the researcher to use the porous area to make the MOFs conduct electricity.
"Importantly, MOFs possess a characteristic of molecules that allows us to adapt their properties to a specific application: we can perform chemistry on them, unlike traditional inorganic electronic materials, such as silicon and copper," Alec Talin, a material scientist at Sandia and the paper's lead author said.
"[Molecules represent the] ultimate, small-scale unit" for electronic device creation, Talin said. "How you connect to molecules, where you place them - those issues have consistently perplexed materials scientists."
The team hopes to utilize the full potential of their discovery in the future.
"Our next step needs to be the exploration of other hosts and guest molecules," Talin said. "We'd like to experiment with different MOF structures and different organic molecules to see if new behavior emerges. We want to see where this new learning takes us."
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