Modified lamellar structures

"Research is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought"

Albert Szent-Györgyi

May 11, 2023 

Hi, it's Giulia.

Today, I would like to talk you about modified lamellar structures.

One of the new challenges at ITQ is the synthesis and the use of newlamellar organometallic materials for catalytic and photocatalytic applications.

Nowadays, new materials can be produced in lab via a process called “solvothermal syntehsis”, which needs a temperature of 120°C for about 72 hours, and then treated by exfoliation; a porous, layered material is obtained, made of a zeolite skeleton linked by covalent bonds with cations such as cerium ( a lanthanide) by a covalent bond, that is strong and irreversible. This characteristic is very important because it gives mechanical, thermical and structural stability, but at the same time the lamellar nature of the material allows flexibility. The result is a great synergy between all the components, and new properties were discovered, in addition to the properties of the single units.

These materials play also an important role in Green Chemistry: first of all, they can be used as efficient catalysts (according to the 9^th principle), they can be recycled at the end of a process or synthesis and the ones with acid or basic sites can replace traditional acids and bases such as hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid and sodium hydroxide, that are corrosive, might damage materials and they generate large amounts of salts that cannot always be reused. 

Hope you enjoyed! Thanks for reading! 😊

Giulia B. 😸

P.S. If you want to know more about our work in the lab, why don't you have a look at the video? 👇👇