The Chemistry of Porous Organic Molecular Materials

Porous organic molecular materials are a subclass of porous solids that are defined by their modular, molecular structures, and the absence of extended covalent or coordination bonding in the solid-state. As a result, porous molecular materials are soluble and they can be processed into different forms, such as mixed matrix membranes. The structure of the porous modules can be fine-tuned for specific applications, such as gas isotope separations, and in some cases the solid-state properties of these materials can be defined by the structure of the porous molecule as viewed in isolation. In this review, the authors focus on the design of porous organic molecular materials and how their properties can be tuned for specific applications by using crystal engineering techniques. The authors distinguish between strategies where porosity is defined largely by the molecule itself, for example, in porous organic cages, and cases where porosity is generated by the solid-state crystalline assembly. They emphasize the importance of computational techniques in the de novo design of functional, porous organic molecular materials, and how molecular modeling is applied to understand the properties of these materials.