Designing Confinement: Cages, Networks and Frameworks

Intensifying water scarcity and climate change demand new approaches to aqueous separations, particularly the separation of trace contaminants from drinking water and the capture of ‘critical metals’ from wastewater sources. The Taylor lab at the University of Maryland uses the tools of supramolecular assembly and reticular chemistry to tackle these difficult aqueous separations. Specifically, we study the self-assembly of metal-organic cages as a technique for the separation of one metal species from a mixture of similar metals, and we design functionalized covalent organic frameworks (COFs) as adsorbents for the capture of contaminants such as PFAS. This seminar will describe our progress in the transformation of COF linkages into diverse functional handles, the cross-linking of 2D COFs to produce 3D structures, and the separation of rare-earth ions through supramolecular cage formation.

Speaker: William Clemons, Jr, Caltech