Leili Esrafili doctoral defense “Synthesis of new nano metal-organic frameworks with urea and thiourea ligands and investigation of their application in sensing, catalysis, and removal of hazardous materials” will take place on Monday 9th of may at 1 p.m via Teams. Her PhD work focused on the design and synthesis of metal organic frameworks to be used as catalysts, heavy metal adsorbents and sensors. Contact Leili Esrafili for the link. 

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“Everybody today has heard about the increasing need of having cheap, environmentally sustainable and green processes. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are organic-inorganic crystalline porous materials that consist of a regular array of metal ions surrounded by organic molecules. MOFs can be put together arbitrarily like Lego bricks and outperform every previously known class of material in terms of flexibility. Researchers have synthesized MOFs that feature a surface area of more than 7800 square meters per gram. To put this into context, if you could lay out the available surface area in a teaspoon of this material (around a gram of solid), it would cover an entire soccer field. By making MOFs from different metal atoms and organic linkers, we were able to create materials that selectively absorb or detect specific guest molecules into tailor-made pockets within the structure or catalyse a specific chemical reaction. The advantages of our scaffolds are immense: uniform, reproducible and controllable manufacture, and the possibility to completely engineer the linkers. As a consequence, we can control the whole network structure: we can personalize it, giving new properties to the walls, and tuning the pore size. In this thesis I have designed and synthesized a series of MOFs with different organic functional groups and used them as catalysts, heavy metal adsorbents and sensors. Compared with other conventional porous structures that have been used these 3D structures showed high efficiency and selectivity. The various examples in my thesis will represent you there is much room for research to explore new materials and exploit new territories for potential application”