Most Convoluted Crystal Ever Made Has Enough Surface Area To Cover A Desk
Little Particle, Lots of Surface Area A small quantity of the metal-organic framework on the right contains enough internal surface area to blanket the high-rise on the left. Farha et. al. via Journal of the American Chemical SocietyNew metal-organic frameworks have so much internal surface area a single gram could blanket one-and-a-half football fields. Today in cool stuff happening in university labs: Northwestern researchers have created two new record-setting synthetic materials with the greatest internal surface areas ever seen. There are a lot of potential applications for these metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), named NU-109 and NU-110, but first the mind-bending fact: if you were to unfold a crystal of NU-110 the size of a grain of salt, the surface area would cover a desktop. If you were to do the same with a single gram of NU-110, the internal surface area would cover one-and-a-half football fields. One kilogram? Something like seven square kilometers,...