Clarkson Assistant Professor of Chemistry & Biomolecular Science Dr. Mario Wriedt has been given a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award for his work on the design of a new class of advanced porous materials for energy applications. This award is entitled "Zwitterionic Metal-Organic Frameworks with Multi-Stimulus-Responsive Properties" and comes with a federal grant of $600,000 for research and education for five years. The reviewing, and award and selection process is one of the most competitive within the NSF.
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a new class of highly porous materials that are structured similarly to a jungle gym, where the nodes represent metal clusters or metal ions, the struts are organic ligands, and the resulting pores of the framework are accessible for guest molecules.
This technology can be applied to our modern energy landscape, allowing for carbon capture from flue gases or small-molecule separation of petroleum products.
Until now, the challenge was to design a material with a low energy requirement for an efficient capture and release process.
"We design new functional materials which can selectively adsorb specific molecules from mixtures with high efficiency and reliability. Most importantly, the adsorbates can be released by pure light irradiation, so there's no energy penalty anymore because light is abundant," Wriedt said.
See more details on this award published by NSF here: https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1752771&HistoricalAwards=false and for more about Wriedt's work click here: https://webspace.clarkson.edu/~mwriedt/. You can check out a video on MOF's with Mario Wriedt here: https://youtu.be/uXAErqcX97M
