A Highly Porous and Robust (3,3,4)-Connected Metal-Organic Framework Assembled with a 90° Bridging-Angle Embedded Octacarboxylate Ligand

The chemistry of the coordination polymers has in recent years advanced extensively, affording various architectures, which are constructed from a variety of molecular building blocks with different interactions between them. The next challenge is the chemical and physical functionalization of these architectures, through the porous properties of the frameworks. This review concentrates on three aspects of coordination polymers: 1). the use of crystal engineering to construct porous frameworks from connectors and linkers ("nanospace engineering"), 2). characterizing and cataloging the porous properties by functions for storage, exchange, separation, etc., and 3). the next generation of porous functions based on dynamic crystal transformations caused by guest molecules or physical stimuli. Our aim is to present the state of the art chemistry and physics of and in the micropores of porous coordination polymers.

New materials capable of storing hydrogen at high gravimetric and volumetric densities are required if hydrogen is to be widely employed as a clean alternative to hydrocarbon fuels in cars and other mobile applications. With exceptionally high surface areas and chemically-tunable structures, microporous metal-organic frameworks have recently emerged as some of the most promising candidate materials. In this critical review we provide an overview of the current status of hydrogen storage within such compounds. Particular emphasis is given to the relationships between structural features and the enthalpy of hydrogen adsorption, spectroscopic methods for probing framework-H(2) interactions, and strategies for improving storage capacity (188 references).