MOF-5 Cap and Guest Interplay

Colecraft, Kweku S.

Student Work

MOF-5 Cap and Guest Interplay

Public

Over the past 20 years Metal Organic Frameworks have been a hot topic of research due to having the largest surface areas and porosities of all the microporous materials. These features have made MOFs to be desirable for applications in fields such as drug delivery, carbon capture, catalysis, storage, and separations processes. The Grimm, Burdette, and McDonald groups have developed a mechanism for coordinating capping molecules onto the surface of MOF-5 via a hydrothermal process to seal in guest molecules that are introduced into the pores. In the previous studies, Crystal Violet, a large sterically bulky dye, was successfully trapped within the pores of MOF-5 by various capping reagents. This study explores the next step in the development of the capping and trapping mechanism which is to understand the cap and guest relationship between caps and smaller guest molecules. We hypothesized that the large sterically bulky cap triphenyl acetic acid would trap methylene blue, a smaller dye, in MOF-5 and that the less bulky cap methylene blue would fail to trap the methylene blue within MOF-5. Overall, this study advances the field of research further towards MOFs being used for drug delivery.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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