Synthetic Materials Set New World Record For Greatest Amount of Surface Area

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @03:09PM from the narrowly-beating-out-your-mamma dept.

Zothecula writes "Researchers at Northwestern University, Illinois, have broken a world record in the creation of two synthetic materials, named NU-109 and NU-110, which have the greatest amount of surface areas of any material to date (abstract). To put this into perspective: if one were able to take a crystal of NU-110 the size of a grain of salt, and somehow unfold it, the surface area would cover a desktop. Additionally, the internal surface area of just one gram of the new material would cover one-and-a-half football fields."

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Re:What are the implications? by jo_ham · 2012-09-11 15:48 · Score: 3, Informative

Catalysis, gas storage, filtering, scaffolds for molecular construction etc.
Extremely high surface area materials are already extensively used in chemistry for this sort of thing.
A video about MOFs by chriswilmer · 2012-09-11 16:15 · Score: 3, Informative

For those of you who are curious to know more about our MOF research at Northwestern University: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaKSekjAnqY