Exploiting chemically selective weakness in solids as a route to new porous materials

Weakness in a material, especially when challenged by chemical, mechanical or physical stimuli, is often viewed as something extremely negative. There are countless examples in which interesting-looking materials have been dismissed as being too unstable for an application. But instability with respect to a stimulus is not always a negative point. In this Perspective we highlight situations where weakness in a material can be used as a synthetic tool to prepare materials that, at present, are difficult or even impossible to prepare using traditional synthetic approaches. To emphasize the concept, we will draw upon examples in the field of nanoporous materials, concentrating on metal-organic frameworks and zeolites, but the general concepts are likely to be applicable across a wide range of materials chemistry. In zeolite chemistry, there is a particular problem with accessing hypothetical structures that this approach may solve

Mesostructured Zeolites

Mesoporous materials constructed with microporous zeolitic frameworks (i.e., mesoporous zeolites) are of great interest owing to the very short diffusion path lengths across thin zeolite layers and the presence of large external surfaces containing strong Brønsted acid sites. These characteristics of mesoporous zeolites are highly advantageous for a wide range of applications, particularly in heterogeneous catalysis. The mesoporous materials show unprecedentedly high catalytic performances (e.g., high catalytic conversion and catalytic longevity) as zeolites in various petrochemical reactions and fine-chemical organic reactions and especially in reactions involving bulky molecules. In this chapter, we describe the various methods currently available for the synthesis of mesoporous zeolites