Covalent Organic Frameworks and Cage Compounds
Porous Materials exhibit interesting properties such as great intrinsic surfaces, defined pore sizes, or high permeabilites for small molecules. Thus, they are very promising candidates for novel materials in gas storage and separation, heterogenous catalysis or sensing applications. Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and cage compounds, being accessible from simple molecular precursurs by reversible bond formation utilizing dynamic covalent chemistry (DCC), are highly topical examples for such kind of functional materials.
In our research group, we are investigating several organic building blocks with octahedral symmetry, e.g., fullerene derivatives or centrohexaindanes, regarding their potential as connectivity centers for the synthesis of porous structures with cubic symmetry. We are focused on the synthesis and characterization of appropriate octahedral molecular precursors, their linkage into complex frameworks and the analysis of intrinsic properties for the resulting materials, e.g., porosity or gas absorption capacity.
