Kearsey Rachel J, Alston Ben M, Briggs Michael E, Greenaway Rebecca L, Cooper Andrew I
Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory , University of Liverpool , Crown Street , Liverpool , L69 7ZD , UK . Email:
Chem Sci. 2019 Aug 28;10(41):9454-9465. doi: 10.1039/c9sc03316e. eCollection 2019 Nov 7.
Porous liquids are an emerging class of materials and to date little is known about how to best design their properties. For example, bulky solvents are required that are size-excluded from the pores in the liquid, along with high concentrations of the porous component, but both of these factors may also contribute to higher viscosities, which are undesirable. Hence, the inherent multivariate nature of porous liquids makes them amenable to high-throughput optimisation strategies. Here we develop a high-throughput robotic workflow, encompassing the synthesis, characterisation and property testing of highly-soluble, vertex-disordered porous organic cages dissolved in a range of cavity-excluded solvents. As a result, we identified 29 cage-solvent combinations that combine both higher cage-cavity concentrations and more acceptable carrier solvents than the best previous examples. The most soluble materials gave three times the pore concentration of the best previously reported scrambled cage porous liquid, as demonstrated by increased gas uptake. We were also able to explore alternative methods for gas capture and release, including liberation of the gas by increasing the temperature. We also found that porous liquids can form gels at higher concentrations, trapping the gas in the pores, which could have potential applications in gas storage and transportation.
多孔液体是一类新兴材料，迄今为止，对于如何最佳设计其性能知之甚少。例如，需要使用尺寸被排除在液体孔隙之外的大体积溶剂，以及高浓度的多孔组分，但这两个因素也可能导致更高的粘度，而这是不理想的。因此，多孔液体固有的多变量性质使其适合高通量优化策略。在此，我们开发了一种高通量机器人工作流程，涵盖了溶解在一系列排除空腔溶剂中的高溶解性、顶点无序多孔有机笼的合成、表征和性能测试。结果，我们确定了29种笼-溶剂组合，它们比之前最好的例子具有更高的笼-空腔浓度和更合适的载体溶剂。最易溶解的材料的孔隙浓度是之前报道的最易溶解的无序笼状多孔液体的三倍，气体吸收增加证明了这一点。我们还能够探索气体捕获和释放的替代方法，包括通过升高温度释放气体。我们还发现，多孔液体在较高浓度下可以形成凝胶，将气体捕获在孔隙中，这在气体储存和运输方面可能具有潜在应用。
