Recently, Professor Wan Chongqing and his team of the Department of Chemistry, CNU published a research paper entitled Melt-quenched Glass Formation of a Family of Metal-carboxylate Frameworks, with Capital Normal University (CNU) as the first unit, in the top international journal Nature Communications.

Metal-organic Framework (MOF) glass is a new type of glass. Different from traditional inorganic glass, plexiglass and metallic glass, it boasts unique structural composition and novel properties, which is of great significance for the development and utilization of new materials and the glassy state theory. Due to MOF's structural characteristics, the melt quenching and glass preparation of MOF materials have always been challenging. Wan Chongqing and his team have long been concerned about the thermal melting behavior of MOF materials, and have developed a new strategy in the paper, that is, to reduce the coordination bond energy and promote ligand translocation through the charge delocalization and dense packing structure of the zwitterion-acid system, so as to reduce the melting temperature. The feasibility and universality of the strategy were verified by the fusibility transformation of a series of non-fusible carboxylic acid ligand MOFs (UiO-67, UiO-68 and DUT-5). The strategy has also been successfully extended to the thermal melting of porous covalent organic framework (COF) materials. The research results were contemporaneously published in the Chem. Mater.­ of American Chemical Society. They provide new methods and opportunities for the thermal melting and processability of many powder-based porous molecular materials.

Nature Communicationsis an influential multidisciplinary open-access journal with an impact factor of 16.6, dedicated to publishing high-quality, cutting-edge research in the fields of biology, medicine, health, physics, chemistry, and earth sciences. This project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing -Xiaomi Joint Fund.

Text link: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.3c02552