Designing novel organic&-inorganic frameworks*
Filipe A. Almeida Paz1,2 and Jacek Klinowski1
1Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK; 2Department of Chemistry, CICECO, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal
Abstract: Crystal engineering of coordination frameworks is a topical and rapidly advancing field, and a variety of entirely new solid materials have been synthesized. We describe the main challenges involved in the hydrothermal approach to these materials using, as an example, cadmium- and zinc-based coordination frameworks. We discuss the unusual crystal architectures of the products, and show that the kind and quality of the resulting crystals are directly controlled by the composition of the ternary reactive mixture and the temperature regime used in the hydrothermal synthesis.
Keywords: crystal engineering; coordination polymers; MOF; metal-organic frameworks; synthesis.
*Paper based on a presentation at the 18th IUPAC International Conference on Physical Organic Chemistry (ICPOC-18), 20-25 August 2006, Warsaw, Poland. Other presentations are published in this issue, pp. 955-1151.