Alicante (Spain), March 8. The Molecular Nanotechnology Laboratory (Nanomol) of the Spanish University of Alicante (UA) has developed a new family of materials that “present revolutionary opportunities for the chemical industry, renewable energies and the reduction of pollutants”, according to a press release from the university institution.
The discovery, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications, “opens up endless possibilities for sectors such as energy or pharmaceuticals,” UA sources said.
In general, scientists seek to make highly ordered materials. For example, zeolites, the largest and most widely used family of catalysts in the chemical industry, consist of periodically repeating units.
“Obsessed with order, we left out materials that lie between the messy and the orderly, where the opportunities are endless. We realized that within imperfect and ill-ordered materials, there are countless possibilities for make new materials with unique properties,” revealed UA researcher and paper author Noemí Linares.
“In what is defective and disordered, the limitations that regular structures often impose do not exist, which opens up endless possibilities for the creation and design of materials”, underlined, for his part, the professor of chemistry inorganic at UA and director of Nanomol, Javier García Martínez.
Based on this idea, the UA researchers constructed materials halfway between the ordered structures, called zeolites. These hybrid materials have important advantages, such as a high specific surface which allows them to transform very large molecules, which was not possible until now with conventional zeolites, which have very narrow pores.
Specifically, it is a “material on the border between order and disorder”, as defined by the researcher and also author of the article Mónica J. Mendoza Castro, which “presents irregular but very large cavities that make it possible to transform more complex and bulky molecules”.
To obtain these materials, the UA research team used a process explained by García Martínez with the following example: “It is as if we had stopped the transformation of a worm into a butterfly, while the process is not yet finished, and we have discovered that at this point there is something completely new, fascinating and with innumerable applications”.
The discovery presents “a revolution in the field of catalysis that is essential for making the chemical industry more sustainable”, according to UA sources, who point out that the technology has already been patented.
This work, in which researchers from the University of Manchester (UK) also participated, is co-financed by funds from the European Horizon 2020 ZeoBioChem project and by the Department of Science and Innovation.