Abstract

The chemistry of metal-organic and covalent organic frameworks (MOFs and COFs) is perhaps the most diverse and inclusive among the chemical sciences, and yet it can be radically expanded by blending it with nanotechnology. The result is reticular nanoscience, an area of reticular chemistry that has an immense potential in virtually any technological field. 

In this talk, we explore the extension of such an interdisciplinary reach by surveying the explored and unexplored possibilities that framework nanoparticles can offer. We localize these unique nanosized reticular materials at the juncture between the molecular and the macroscopic worlds, and describe the resulting synthetic and analytical chemistry, which is fundamentally different from conventional frameworks. Such differences are mirrored in the properties that reticular nanoparticles exhibit, which we described while referring to the present state-of-the-art and future promising applications in medicine, catalysis, energy-related applications, and sensors. Finally, the bottom-up approach of reticular nanoscience, inspired by nature, is brought to its full extension by introducing the concept of augmented reticular chemistry. Its approach departs from a single-particle scale to reach higher mesoscopic and even macroscopic dimensions, where framework nanoparticles become building units themselves and the resulting super-materials approach new levels of sophistication of structures and properties. 

Biography

Stefan Wuttke was born in 1980 in Guben (Germany) and completed his Diploma in chemistry in 2005 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in cooperation with the University of Glasgow. He completed his PhD in 2009 with Prof. E. Kemnitz at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. For his postdoctoral research he moved to the Institute Lavoisier de Versailles (Prof. G. Férey and Dr. C. Serre) and Laboratoire Catalyse et Spectrochimie – ENSICAEN (Prof. M. Daturi), supported by a Feodor Lynen grant. Since 2011, Stefan Wuttke has been an independent leader of the research group “Wuttkegroup for Science”, hosted at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Munich (LMU), and at the Center for Nanoscience (CeNS) at the LMU. Currently, he is an Ikerbasque Professor at the Basque Center for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures (BCMaterials). His research is focused on all aspects of internal and external surface engineering of porous hybrid bulk- and nanomaterials and in the exploration of the unexpressed potential of “the materials beyond” (materials with multiple functional moieties that display synergetic effects). To this end, his group are developing methodologies to both read and write chemical information from and onto architecture backbone of hybrid materials. At the same time, a basic understanding of the involved chemical and physical elementary processes in the synthesis and functionalization of these materials is pursued.