Nanomaterial Discovery as a tool for innovation
Wednesday, October 5th, 2022, in collaboration with the Royal Scientific Society EDAMA held a round table discussion to introduce new water and energy technologies. Mr. Kyle Cordova the Executive Director of Scientific Research Sector and Senior Assistant to the president of Scientific Affairs introduced the delivery of Clean, Drinkable Water from the Air to Anyone, Anywhere at Any time. Followed by Dr.Bassem Al-Maythalony informing us about The Chemistry and Applications of Metal-Organic Frameworks for Clean Energy.
Harvesting water vapor from the desert, arid environments by metal-organic framework (MOF) based devices to deliver clean, drinkable liquid water is critically dependent on the environment and climate conditions. However, reported devices have yet been developed to adapt in real-time to such conditions during their operation, which severely limits water production efficiency and unnecessarily increases power consumption. In this seminar, we discussed and detailed the success in inventing a new mode of water harvesting operation, termed ‘adaptive water harvesting’, from which a MOF-based device was proven capable of adapting the adsorption and desorption phases of its water harvesting cycle to climate fluctuations throughout a given day, week, month, and year such that its water production efficiency is continuously optimized.
A note on The Chemistry and Applications of Metal-Organic Frameworks for Clean Energy
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of crystalline, porous materials, where organic linkers and inorganic units are alternately connected to form frameworks. The flexibility with which these components can be varied has led to the most extensive class of materials with high surface areas and high thermal/chemical stability. These characteristics allow the interior of MOFs to be chemically altered for use in gas storage, gas separation, batteries/supercapacitors, and fuel cells, among others. The precise control over the assembly of MOFs is expected to propel this field further into new realms of synthetic chemistry in which far more sophisticated materials may be accessed in order to more effectively address problems facing the world in energy.
