www.asiachem.news December 2021 | 49 mical Plants: Manufacturers POLYMERS, ALONGSIDE METALS and ceramics, make up one of the three fundamental types of materials that enable our modern way of life. Owing to their characteristic light weight and customizable physical properties, the range of applications for polymers is continually expanding, calling for the development of polymeric materials which exhibit excellent functionality of any and all kinds. However, when we synthesize polymers, we typically do so in a flask or reactor – a macro-scale vessel. In this case, we may obtain polymeric materials at low cost and in great quantity, but their polymer chains are unavoidably entangled, and control over their molecular structures is often difficult. If instead we were to use a reaction vessel of a scale that matches the individual size of target polymer chains, we should be able to precisely control the orientation, position, distance, and electronic state of the ingredient monomers. Thus, the vessel itself is expected to exert great influence on the polymerization reaction, and may be able to precisely control the resulting polymer structure and aggregation state from the moment it is formed. In recent years, structurally regular porous materials formed from the self-assembly of metal ions and organic ligands – metal-organic frameworks or “MOFs” - have gathered much attention1-3. The number of combinations of metal ions and ligands in these organic-inorganic hybrids are limitless, so by choosing the structural ingredients appropriately one can not only control the pore space and its dimensionality, but also its shape and the presence or absence of functional groups (Figure 1). Further, by tuning the electronic structure of these building blocks, it is possible By Keat Beamsley and Takashi Uemura https://doi.org/10.51167/acm00023
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