Commercial agriculture and industrial manufacturing have contaminated freshwater sources with persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, and radioactive species. Effective mitigation of this pollution is paramount to safeguarding human health, animal and aquatic life, and the environment. Conventional adsorbents such as activated carbon, metal oxides, resins, and polymers attain moderate to high adsorption capacities and are commercially viable; however, these materials are often amorphous and difficult to characterize which impedes the rational design of next-generation sorbents. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous, crystalline materials comprised of metal oxide nodes and organic linkers assembled into multidimensional lattices. Given their modular nature, MOFs are an ideal scaffold for systematically investigating the material properties that contribute to rapid and efficient toxin capture. Their inherent porosity facilitates diffusion and the periodic distribution of potential binding sites at nodes and linkers promotes high uptake capacities. After exploring the role that the nodes and linkers play in adsorption in my first publications, I aimed to determine the thermodynamic forces driving adsorption in MOFs. In the most recent studies I published, we demonstrated the suitability of isothermal titration calorimetry for tackling this challenge. I thoroughly examined how analyte and MOF structural features influence adsorption and I directly quantified the thermodynamic profile of the adsorption processes in several well-known Zr-based MOFs. This work advances the field by improving our ability to directly observe adsorption in MOFs, and future applications of this technique can enhance the study of catalysis and diffusion in these porous materials.

Creator

• Drout, Riki Joyce

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-cr4r-5b15

Subject

• Chemistry

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15522
• etdadmin_upload_814397

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright