Supramolecular inorganic chemistry leading to functional materials

Functional inorganic materials are very important today to meet the needs of our society. The most demanding needs are sustainable and clean energy (it would be nice if that can be achieved from water splitting), smart materials for sensing toxic volatile as well as water-soluble substances (health care) and efficient catalysts that can cycle multiple times without deterioration for useful chemical reactions. Supramolecular chemistry, that plays a vital role to design and synthesize such functional molecules, controls over the intermolecular interactions, thereby the molecular recognition processes leading to molecular functions, e.g., sensing, catalysis, etc. This article deals with inorganic supramolecular chemistry of a number of mono-nuclear coordination complexes to selected di-nuclear systems through trinuclear metal basic carboxylates, mostly in their solid-state, leading to the functional inorganic materials. We have demonstrated that some of the very old inorganic systems can be explored in the light of supramolecular chemistry to describe them as functional materials, which have potential in serving our society to some extent.