Metal Organic Framework: Crystalline Stacked Molecular Containers

Abstract

X-ray crystallography is the most comprehensive characterization tool to gain a molecular level understanding of a range of crystalline materials. One of the recent areas in which research with the aid of crystallography has exploded, is the metal organic frameworks (MOFs). These are porous crystalline solids with exceptionally large surface areas capable of showing good promise in gas storage and gas separation applications. Here, we have captured the potential of crystallography as a tool to provide direct observation of gas molecules trapped in the pores of the MOF and how such data serves to quantify the interactions that hold the gas within the pores. Insights from this have immediate and far reaching implication for design of gas-selective porous solids in future. The article is written in a highly simplified form, being tutorialistic in parts and we then move on to a case study and decsribe one of the state-of-the-art crystallography applications.