The research team is addressing urgent global challenges across energy sustainability, storage and capture.
A group of researchers at University of Limerick’s (UL) Bernal Institute has received the Academic Collaboration Award from the SSPC Research Ireland Centre for Pharmaceuticals for their long-standing collaboration with Kyoto University’s Prof Susumu Kitagawa, a winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Prof Michael Zaworotko, Prof Soumya Mukherjee and Prof Matthias Vandichel and their groups were awarded for their research on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with Kitagawa and his group.
Kitagawa won the Nobel Prize with Prof Omar Yaghi and Prof Richard Robson for their development of MOFs, a new class of materials that has revolutionised the field of crystal engineering.
Crystal engineering aims to develop new materials by looking at the molecular building blocks of crystals – solid materials with highly ordered arrangements of molecules, ions or atoms. Crystals can occur naturally, examples include diamonds and snowflakes, and can be produced synthetically. Almost all metals, ceramics and semiconductors are crystals. Their predictable properties make them incredibly useful materials to work with.
MOFs are a class of crystals in which metal ions are linked together by organic molecules in a regular pattern to create a 3D network that is highly porous. By using different metals and changing the type and length of the organic linkers, MOFs can be developed for various applications, such as drug delivery, sustainable energy storage, carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.
Alongside the Nobel laureates, UL’s Zaworotko is also recognised as a pioneer in this area, publishing research just after Robson first did in 1989. He is considered the father of a particular class of MOFs called hybrid ultramicroporous materials (HUMs), which have great gas sorption and separation properties, making them useful for applications such as hydrogen storage, carbon capture and air purification.
Zaworotko told SiliconRepublic.com that he has known Nobel laureate Kitagawa since the 1990s but that their collaboration only started when he took up a position at UL in 2013. Here, he began to focus on flexible sorbents, a class of materials that Kitagawa pioneered.
“These materials in effect breathe when they are exposed to heat, light or gas/vapour which produces some special properties for separations and storage of volatile commodities,” Zaworotko said.
The collaboration was “catalysed”, Zaworotko said, when two of his PhD students joined Kitagawa’s group as postdoctoral fellows.
Zaworotko’s former student Kyriaki Koupepidou with Susumu Kitagawa just after the Nobel Prize was announced. Image: Kyriaki Koupepidou
“Teamwork is always a rewarding and effective way to conduct research but when one wants to address the most urgent global challenges, it is a prerequisite,” Zaworotko said.
“This situation is driven by the inherent complexity and interdisciplinarity needed to address carbon capture, water purification, better/cheaper medicines, where disruptive solutions require the design and testing of a new generation of better, cheaper and greener materials.”
Just this month, the collaborative team published a paper about water harvesting.
UL’s Vandichel, a computational chemist and chemical engineer, explained that for this new research his team developed hybrid computational frameworks to better understand the gas sorption behaviour of flexible porous materials.
He explained that for this research, the commonly used Monte Carlo simulations are limited in accuracy. “We demonstrated that our hybrid computational approach was the only method capable of accurately capturing the adsorption behaviour in a flexible MOF.”
Vandichel’s group, along with Prof Sousa Javan Nikkhah at Maynooth University, is now working on enhancing this new method.
Javan Nikkhah, a computational researcher, explained the next step is to integrate “machine-learned interatomic potentials”, that is, computer models that are trained to predict how atoms interact with each other. “This will significantly improve both accuracy and computational efficiency [of the method],” she said.
From left: Matthias Vandichel, Apinya Ngoipala and Sousa Javan Nikkhah. Image: Jennifer Wilson (UL)
According to Javan Nikkhah, the longer term goal for the research group is to develop scalable, predictive simulations that can guide the design of flexible MOFs for applications including gas separation, energy and environmental technologies.
Vandichel said that Zaworotko “creates a vibe for research excellence” at the Bernal Institute.
“Working with leading researchers, such as Prof Kitagawa and Prof Zaworotko, ensures working at the forefront of MOF research,” he said.
“This also challenges my group to develop new computational methods to describe their numerous applications, thus bridging the gap between the real-world crystals and the molecular models and computational methods we use to describe these materials.”
‘Curiosity-driven research’
Similarly, Mukherjee, a materials chemist at UL, said there is a “shared spirit of innovation” among the groups working together on this research. “I’m excited by the synergies between our labs.”
Mukherjee, who described Zaworotko and Kitagawa as “both giants in the field”, recalled his first collaboration with Kitagawa’s team when he was doing postdoctoral research at UL. The project, which culminated in a 2020 publication, advanced the field of gas separations, he explained.
“[It] also solidified my confidence as a researcher: I was no longer just a student in the audience, but a contributing peer alongside my role model.”
Mukherjee was recently invited by Kitagawa to deliver a research seminar at Kyoto University. After the talk, the two men chatted in Kitagawa’s office about upcoming research projects, and the MOF pioneer offered Mukherjee his insights on some challenges he is facing in designing water-stable MOFs. Mukherjee left the office feeling supported by his senior colleague.
As it turned out, it was the very next day that Kitagawa was named a Nobel laureate in chemistry. “I was overjoyed to say the least,” Mukherjee said.
Soumya Mukherjee giving at talk at Kyoto University in October. Image: Soumya Mukherjee
The Nobel Prize is overdue recognition for pioneering work on MOFs, he said, but it’s also “a victory for curiosity-driven research”. Mukherjee explained that one of Kitagawa’s guiding philosophies is that ‘even useless things can become useful’.
“The essence is that we shouldn’t dismiss a research idea just because it doesn’t have an obvious payoff in the moment,” he said.
“Prof Kitagawa’s career is a testament to this motto; he pursued porous frameworks in an era when many chemists thought they were academic curiosities. Indeed, some early MOFs were unstable and seemingly impractical, and funding agencies were sceptical.”
However, Kitagawa persisted out of scientific curiosity and that “‘useless’ science eventually proved incredibly useful”.
“This lesson remains at the core of how I approach research problems: be open-minded and patient, because today’s niche experiment might be tomorrow’s breakthrough.”
‘Better, greener, cheaper’
As Mukherjee eluded to, there has been some criticism of MOFs in the past. These materials have shown great promise in a research setting but transitioning them to industrial-scale and commercially viable applications has proved challenging.
“MOFs have always promised to deliver exceptional properties that could not be achieved by other classes of material and in many ways they have delivered, at least on the scientific side,” said Zaworotko. “Commercialisation is a different matter.
“My new favourite motto is ‘better, cheaper, greener’ – we need all three to solve big problems like water purification, energy sustainability and carbon capture.”
Research on MOFs has exploded since the 2010s and the Nobel recognition will accelerate this even further, the team thinks.
Michael Zaworotko (right) sits next to Nobel laureate Richard Robson and other researchers during a recent trip to the University of Melbourne. Image: Michael Zaworotko
“The recognition is already helping to attract new researchers, strengthen interdisciplinary engagement and stimulate increased investment from both public and industrial stakeholders,” Javan Nikkhah said.
For Zaworotko, “it is not a matter of if MOFs will solve global challenges, it is where and when”.
And he is confident these breakthroughs will happen sooner rather than later.
“If the right MOF (better, cheaper, greener) is available then it can be manufactured and deployed commercially in a relatively short time period, eg a year or two.”
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