The climate crisis is reshaping how we harvest, store, and consume energy globally. To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, we must develop low-cost and energy-efficient materials and mechanisms for carbon capture, hydrogen storage, and sustainable catalysis. In the first part of my talk, I will describe my efforts to develop new hierarchical materials for carbon capture by utilizing framework lability. Synthetic strategies, such as linker deletion and migration, are used to tailor the complex pore environments of metal-organic frameworks for applications in gas storage, separation, and catalysis. In the second part of my talk, I will describe my design of an active adsorption mechanism that provides a potential solution for effective decarbonization. Over the past century, adsorption has been investigated extensively only in equilibrium systems, with a focus on physisorption and chemisorption. I will present the first fundamentally new mode of adsorption—mechanisorption—since the observation of physisorption and chemisorption in the 1930s, which results from non-equilibrium pumping to form mechanical bonds between adsorbents and adsorbates. Analogous to the mechanism in living organisms to control the active transport of ions across membranes, adsorbates are transported from one well-defined compartment—the bulk—to another well-defined compartment—the interface—thereby creating a vast chemical potential gradient commensurate with storing energy in a metastable state. Mechanisorption extends, in a fundamental manner, the scope and potential of adsorption phenomena and offers a transformative approach to control chemistry at surfaces and interfaces. Lastly, I will summarize the progress and provide an outlook for my next steps and future research vision in driving continuous adsorption of carbon dioxide from low-concertation regions, the air, to highly concentrated surfaces through this new active adsorption mechanism.


Liang Feng (Northwestern University)