Professor Katherine Mirica’s group has recently demonstrated the promising future of two novel classes of porous materials, namely covalent organic frameworks (COFs) and metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), in energy storage and toxic gas detection.
In collaboration with Prof. Cory Simon at Oregon State University, the team has created a sensor array from conductive COFs, a family of ultra-thin, highly porous materials, to detect and differentiate toxic gases. In the paper published in JACS, the Mirica group and collaborators showed that four related COFs can work together like an electronic nose to detect and distinguish nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. By reading the combined electrical signals from the array and using machine-learning tools, the researchers could accurately identify which gas was present, even at very low concentrations and under realistic conditions that include air and humidity. By combining materials development and machine learning, this work demonstrates a powerful approach to chemical sensing, with potential implications for noninvasive medical diagnostics, industrial safety, and environmental monitoring.
The Mirica group also collaborated with Prof. Fiona Li's team from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth in another study and has developed a new porous, sheet-like material that could make future rechargeable batteries longer-lasting and more reliable—even in extreme cold. The material developed by the postdoctoral scholar Dr. Hyuk-Jun Noh, called HATN-O-Zn, is a type of MOF engineered to store electrical energy efficiently, while remaining remarkably stable over time. In a recent paper published in Angewandte Chemie, they showed that the new MOF-based material delivered high capacity, strong durability over thousands of charge–discharge cycles, and steady performance at temperatures as low as –20 °C. This discovery offers a promising new pathway for creating safer, more resilient sodium-ion batteries, an emerging alternative to today’s lithium-ion technology.
