Issue 18, 2022

Porous liquids – the future is looking emptier

Abstract

The development of microporosity in the liquid state is leading to an inherent change in the way we approach applications of functional porosity, potentially allowing access to new processes by exploiting the fluidity of these new materials. By engineering permanent porosity into a liquid, over the transient intermolecular porosity in all liquids, it is possible to design and form a porous liquid. Since the concept was proposed in 2007, and the first examples realised in 2015, the field has seen rapid advances among the types and numbers of porous liquids developed, our understanding of the structure and properties, as well as improvements in gas uptake and molecular separations. However, despite these recent advances, the field is still young, and with only a few applications reported to date, the potential that porous liquids have to transform the field of microporous materials remains largely untapped. In this review, we will explore the theory and conception of porous liquids and cover major advances in the area, key experimental characterisation techniques and computational approaches that have been employed to understand these systems, and summarise the investigated applications of porous liquids that have been presented to date. We also outline an emerging discovery workflow with recommendations for the characterisation required at each stage to both confirm permanent porosity and fully understand the physical properties of the porous liquid.

Graphical abstract: Porous liquids – the future is looking emptier

Article information

Article type
Perspective
Submitted
05 yan 2022
Accepted
11 apr 2022
First published
25 apr 2022
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY license

Chem. Sci., 2022,13, 5042-5054

Porous liquids – the future is looking emptier

B. D. Egleston, A. Mroz, K. E. Jelfs and R. L. Greenaway, Chem. Sci., 2022, 13, 5042 DOI: 10.1039/D2SC00087C

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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