Design of porous polymer for gas and energy storage. The combination of the structural flexible “organic moieties” and the robustness of “inorganic metal clusters” in hybrid porous polymers provides nanospace through their porosity and can act as molecular hosts for recognition and storage of guest species. Confinement of targeted species in the nanospace of porous polymer lead to novel properties for wide variety of applications including oxygen storage at room temperature, selective capture of carbon dioxide, and can be self-scarified templates for the synthesis of other novel functional materials.
Oxygen Storage for Clean Energy Applications
The storage of pure oxygen has main applications in aerospace industries and in medical devices for respiratory symptoms. Currently, large-scale capture of oxygen from air is carried out using a cryogenic distillation process associated with high energy consumption. One of the most important challenges for designing efficient adsorbents for oxygen storage is the capability to operate the adsorption process at ambient pressure and temperature due to safety concerns of oxygen gas cylinder and to reduce the operating cost.
Our team focuses on the design and synthesis of several organic- inorganic hybrid porous polymers for oxygen storage. The ability to tune the pore structure and pore surface of the materials make them promising candidates for oxygen storage. Our strategy is to increase the number of oxygen-accessible units for oxygen binding in the porous polymer. The strategy has been realized by leave redox-active metal nodes, or metal nodes that have greater oxygen affinity, incompletely coordinated by organic linkers, and create preference sites for oxygen binding. Moreover, structural defects can create new pores that enable the selective binding of oxygen from air leading to an increase in oxygen uptake with high purity.
Capture of oxygen from air via redox-reaction in porous polymer.
Selective Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
Carbon dioxide (CO
2) storage in adsorbents or porous materials is an emerging technology that have been significantly developed in recent years to reduce greenhouse gas emission caused by energy production processes. The combination of a high surface area with a suitable pore functionality specific to CO
2 is important to separate CO
2 from gas mixture.
Selective CO2 capture at atmospheric pressure in iron-based MOF.
Metal-organic framework (MOF) or porous coordination polymer (PCP) is a class of porous polymer constructed from various metal ions and organic linkers. MOF provides several remarkable features such as ultra-high surface area, tunable porosity and chemical functionality. Our team employs MOF showing structural flexibility (flexible MOFs) for CO
2 separation because the flexible MOFs show CO
2 uptake with weak interaction including Van Der Waals interaction. One of notable advantage of using flexible MOFs is the capability to control the desorption (regeneration) energy of the adsorbed CO
2.
Templated Nanoporous Carbon
Carbonization of porous polymer templated into porous carbon with a foam-like microstructure.
Nanoporous carbon is promising for industrial applications due to its stability, electrochemical performance, and large specific surface area with an adjustable pore size. The performance of porous carbon rely on the structure of porous carbon itself. To date, several attempts have been made to design and control the structures of porous carbon at molecular scale by carbonization of carbon precursors accommodated in porous templates.
Our team employs organic-inorganic hybrid materials as the self-scarified templates to prepare porous carbon in a predictable manner. We propose the new concept to control structure of porous carbon by use of the chemical reaction of organic moiety in the materials. The new approach would inspire further design of new carbon structures for specific energy storage application by use of appropriate organic-inorganic hybrid materials.
- Kongpatpanich K., Horike S., Fujiwara Y., Ogiwara N., Kitagawa S., Chemistry – A European Journal 21, 13278-13283 (2015).
- Fujiwara Y., Horike S., Kongpatpanich K., Sugiyama T., Tobori N., Nishihara H., Kitagawa S., Inorganic Chemistry Frontier 2, 473-476 (2015).
- Kongpatpanich K., Horike S., Sugimoto M., Fukushima T., Umeyama D., Tsutsumi Y., Kitagawa S., Inorganic Chemistry 53, 9870-9875 (2014).
- Kongpatpanich K., Horike S., Sugimoto M., Kitao S., Seto M., Kitagawa S., Chemical Communications 50, 2292-2294 (2014).
- Kishida K., Horike S., Kongpatpanich K., Kitagawa S., Australian Journal of Chemistry 66, 464-469 (2013).
- Horike S., Sugimoto M., Kongpatpanich K., Hijikata Y., Inukai M., Umeyama D., Kitao S., Seto M., Kitagawa S., Journal of Materials Chemistry A 1, 3675-3679 (2013).
Dr. Kanokwan Kongpatpanich (Lecturer)
Dr. Chularat Wattanakit (Lecturer)
Dr. Sippakorn Wannakao
(Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Dr. Wattanachai Jumpathong
(Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Mr. Taweesak Pila
Mr. Vitsarut Tangsermvit
Ms. Panchanit Piyakeeratikul
International Research Collaborator:
Prof. Alexie Kolpak MIT
Prof. Michael Probst University of Innsbruck
Assist. Prof. Bundet Boekfa Kasetsart University
Wangchan Valley 555 Moo 1 Payupnai, Wangchan, Rayong 21210 Thailand
