Joonho Park

Unprecedented high-temperature CO2 selectivity in N2-phobic nanoporous covalent organic polymers

Post-combustion CO(2) capture and air separation are integral parts of the energy industry, although the available technologies remain inefficient, resulting in costly energy penalties. Here we report azo-bridged, nitrogen-rich, aromatic, water stable, nanoporous covalent organic polymers, which can be synthesized by catalyst-free direct coupling of aromatic nitro and amine moieties under basic conditions. Unlike other porous materials, azo-covalent organic polymers exhibit an unprecedented increase in CO(2)/N(2) selectivity with increasing temperature, reaching the highest value (288 at 323 K) reported to date. Here we observe that azo groups reject N(2), thus making the framework N(2)-phobic. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that the origin of the N(2) phobicity of the azo-group is the entropic loss of N(2) gas molecules upon binding, although the adsorption is enthalpically favourable. Any gas separations that require the efficient exclusion of N(2) gas would do well to employ azo units in the sorbent chemistry.

High capacity carbon dioxide adsorption by inexpensive covalent organic polymers

Efficient CO2 scrubbing without a significant energy penalty remains an outstanding challenge for the fossil fuel-burning industry where aqueous amine solutions are still widely used. Porous materials have long been evaluated for next generation CO2 adsorbents. Porous polymers, robust and inexpensive, show promise as feasible materials for the capture of CO2 from warm exhaust fumes. We report the syntheses of porous covalent organic polymers (COPs) with CO2 adsorption capacities of up to 5616 mg g−1 (measured at high pressures, i.e. 200 bar) and industrially relevant temperatures (as warm as 65 °C). COPs are stable in boiling water for at least one week and near infinite CO2/H2 selectivity is observed.

Tuning Metal–Organic Frameworks with Open-Metal Sites and Its Origin for Enhancing CO2 Affinity by Metal Substitution

Reducing anthropogenic carbon emission is a problem that requires immediate attention. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as a promising new materials platform for carbon capture, of which Mg-MOF-74 offers chemospecific affinity toward CO2 because of the open Mg sites. Here we tune the binding affinity of CO2 for M-MOF-74 by metal substitution (M = Mg, Ca, and the first transition metal elements) and show that Ti- and V-MOF-74 can have an enhanced affinity compared to Mg-MOF-74 by 6-9 kJ/mol. Electronic structure calculations suggest that the origin of the major affinity trend is the local electric field effect of the open metal site that stabilizes CO2, but forward donation from the lone-pair electrons of CO2 to the empty d-levels of transition metals as in a weak coordination bond makes Ti and V have an even higher binding strength than Mg, Ca, and Sc.

Amidoximes: promising candidates for CO2 capture

Monoethanolamine (MEA) dominates power plant carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubbing processes, though with major disadvantages such as a 8–35% energy penalty. Here we report that structurally comparable amidoximes are promising CO2 capture agents based on RIMP2 electronic structure calculations. This was experimentally verified by the synthesis and testing of representative amidoximes for capture efficiencies at pressures as high as 180 bar. Acetamidoxime, which has the highest percent amidoxime functionality showed the highest CO2 capacity (2.71 mmol g−1) when compared to terephthalamidoxime (two amidoximes per molecule) and tetraquinoamidoxime (four amidoximes per molecule). Polyamidoxime surpassed activated charcoal Norit RB3 for CO2 capture per unit surface area. Adsorption isotherms exhibit Type IV behavior and acetamidoxime found to increase CO2 capture with temperature, a less observed anomaly. Porous amidoximes are proposed as valuable alternatives to MEA.

Conformational Characteristics of Unstructured Peptides: α-Synuclein

Abstract We have performed replica-exchange molecular dynamics simulations on 41 residue peptides containing NAC region of α-synuclein in various force fields and solvent conditions. Alpha-synuclein is known to be the major cause of Parkinsons disease by amyloid-like aggregation, and one of the natively unfolded proteins. To investigate conformational characteristics of intrinsically unstructured peptides, we carried out structural analysis by introducing ‘representative structure’ for ensemble of structures occurring during the overall trajectory. Representative structures may be defined by using either coordinate averaging or distance averaging. When applied to the natively folded proteins such as villin headpiece, structural analysis based on representative structure was found to yield consistent results with those obtained from conventional analysis. Individual conformations obtained from the simulations of NAC peptide for various conditions show flexible structures close to random coil. Secondary structure contents and free energy surfaces showed dependency on solvent conditions, which may be interpreted as another manifestation of structural diversity. It is found that representative structures can provide useful information about structural characteristics of intrinsically unstructured proteins.

The binding nature of light hydrocarbons on Fe/MOF-74 for gas separation

The application of a metal-organic framework (MOF) has expanded into the area of heterogeneous catalysis, gas storage and separation, drug delivery, and lightweight magnets. Herein, we investigate the nature of olefin and paraffin binding on Fe/MOF-74 and identify several factors that determine separation efficiency using the first-principles calculations. The calculated binding energies and magnetic orderings are in excellent agreement with those observed in experiments. While the olefin strongly interacts with Fe atoms through a well-known π-complexation, the HOMO - 1(2) of the paraffin weakly interacts with Fe atoms without back-donation, facilitating the olefin-paraffin separation primarily. However, the mutual gas-gas interactions and magnetic transitions of the MOF host also contribute significantly to the total binding energy of each gas molecule as much as 2-28% and 6-8%, respectively, emphasizing the necessity that these subtle effects must be handled carefully when considering selective binding with small energy differences. In particular, Fe/MOF-74 is shown to be a unique system where the guest-dependent magnetic transition observed only for the olefin adsorption is a secondary reason for the high olefin-paraffin adsorption selectivity measured. The understanding of the hydrocarbon binding energetics can provide a way to modify MOFs for enhanced separation/sorption properties that can be complemented by principles of kinetic separation.

Fabrication of low-temperature solid oxide fuel cells with a nanothin protective layer by atomic layer deposition

Anode aluminum oxide-supported thin-film fuel cells having a sub-500-nm-thick bilayered electrolyte comprising a gadolinium-doped ceria (GDC) layer and an yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) layer were fabricated and electrochemically characterized in order to investigate the effect of the YSZ protective layer. The highly dense and thin YSZ layer acted as a blockage against electron and oxygen permeation between the anode and GDC electrolyte. Dense GDC and YSZ thin films were fabricated using radio frequency sputtering and atomic layer deposition techniques, respectively. The resulting bilayered thin-film fuel cell generated a significantly higher open circuit voltage of approximately 1.07 V compared with a thin-film fuel cell with a single-layered GDC electrolyte (approximately 0.3 V).

Systematic Investigation of the Effect of Polymerization Routes on the Gas‐Sorption Properties of Nanoporous Azobenzene Polymers

Functional-group-oriented polymerization strategies have contributed significantly to the initial development of porous polymers and have led to the utilization of several well-known organic transformations in the synthesis of these polymers. Because there are multiple polymerization routes that can be used to introduce the same chemical functionality, it is very important to demonstrate the effect of different polymerization routes on the gas-sorption properties of these chemically similar polymers. Herein, we have studied the rich chemistry of azobenzenes and synthesized four chemically similar nanoporous azobenzene polymers (NABs) with surface areas of up to 1021 m(2)  g(-1) . The polymerization routes have a significant impact on the pore-size distributions of the NABs, which directly affects the temperature dependence of the CO2 /N2 selectivity. A pore-width maximum of 6-8 Å, narrow pore-size distribution, and small particle size (20-30 nm) were very critical for high CO2 /N2 selectivity and N2 phobicity, which is associated with azo linkages and realized at warm temperatures. Our findings collectively suggest that an investigation of different polymerization routes for the same chemical functionalization is critical to understand fully the combined effect of textural properties, local environment, and chemical functionalization on the gas-sorption properties of nanoporous polymers.

Effects of nonmagnetic impurities on the spin transport property of a graphene nanoribbon device

Using a nonequilibrium density functional calculation, we investigated the electronic transport properties and fundamental mechanism of spin polarization as a function of the location of impurities from the center to an edge of a graphene nanoribbon device (GND) with zigzag edges. A center-located impurity enables both edges to be enhanced with respect to their spin transports whereas an edge-located impurity results in only the opposite edge channel being dominant. In the case of a center-located impurity, the ferromagnetic ground state induces new spin states near the Fermi level responsible for the spin-polarized current in the GND. We argue that the spin-polarized current can flow through the edge states induced by a nonmagnetic impurity around the Fermi level, especially on a GND with a center-located impurity.

Assessments of semilocal density functionals and corrections for carbon dioxide adsorption on metal-organic frameworks.

The significant amount of attention that has been directed toward metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for a wide spectrum of applications can be attributed to their variety and tunability, which are precisely the aspects that computational modeling can offer by systematically exploring the chemical space. In this minireview, we describe density functional theory calculations for gas adsorption on MOFs, mainly focusing on the interaction of CO2 with MOF-74. The generalized gradient approximation (GGA) level of density functional studies seems suited to treat MOFs, owing to the balance between its practical applicability and its useful accuracy, although this method is not without deficiencies such as the lack of nonlocal correlations and self-interactions. We review and analyze the effects of correction schemes to the GGA to amend the latter weaknesses, and the choice of exchange correlation functionals to treat MOFs for gas capture and separation. We also discuss a few topical questions that are currently missing in the present literature and that require further investigations.