FMD³
Functional Materials Design, Discovery & Development
Welcome to Prof. Eddaoudi’s
RESEARCH GROUP!
The Functional Materials Design, Discovery & Development research group, headed by Prof. Mohamed Eddaoudi, is mainly focusing on the development of new strategies to design and synthesize new functional solid-state materials for different applications such as gas storage/separation, catalysis. In order to address challenging societal issues such as carbon capture, FMD3 has set up strategies for the construction of nanosized, thin films and membranes based MOFs.
Highlighted
RESEARCH PROJECTS
What's
NEW?
The separation of styrene (ST) and ethylbenzene (EB) mixtures is of great importance in the petrochemical and plastics industries. Current technology employs multiple cycles of energy-intensive distillation due to the very close boiling points of ST and EB. Here, we show that the molecular sieving properties of easily scalable and stable trianglimine crystals offer ultrahigh selectivity (99%) for styrene separation. The unique molecular sieving properties of trianglimine crystals are corroborated by DFT calculations, suggesting that the incorporation of the nonplanar EB requires a significant deformation of the macrocyclic cavity whereas the planar ST can be easily accommodated in the cavity.