Investigating the Mechanism of Cooperative Melting in Metal-Organic Frameworks

DOI

Zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) are formed from inorganic nodes connected by organic ligands, and share structural features with zeolites. They have recently been observed to melt to a molten state, which curiously retains the chemical composition of the crystalline phase. Whilst ZIF-62 [Zn(Im)1.75(bIm)0.25] (Im = imidazolate C3H3N2- and bIm = benzimidazolate C7H5N2-) has been observed to melt at 410 ºC, ZIF-8 [M(mIm)2] (M = Co, Zn and mIm = 2-methylimidazolate C4H5N2-) does not melt before decomposing at ~550 ºC. Curiously, when the two are heated together to only 410 ºC and then cooled, glass is formed whereas Bragg peaks belonging to ZIF-8 would be expected. This highly unusual result paves the way for multiple MOFs to be included within the same liquid/glass state. We wish to gain mechanistic insight into this behaviour by performing an in-situ neutron diffraction experiment.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.89165702
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/89165702
Provenance
Creator Mr Chris Ashling; Mr Louis Longley; Professor David Keen; Mr Chao Zhou; Dr Tom Headen; Dr Tom Bennett
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2021
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Chemistry; Natural Sciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2018-03-12T09:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2018-03-14T13:00:29Z