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Soft Materials Research Lab
The Sharma Group
Porous Liquids
Porous liquid with properties of permanent porosity and fluidity provide an industrially relevant material. The utilization of porous liquids is advantageous over porous solids as the former can be retrofitted for continuous flow processing applications for the post combustion CO2 capture. Porous liquids have been shown since 2015 for the sequestration and separation of different types of gases, however, deployment of a chemical reaction for converting the adsorbed gases to utility chemicals still remains elusive. We have reported for the first time a benign method for the fabrication of a different class of multifunctional porous liquid based on polymer coated hollow silica nanorods and carbonic anhydrase enzyme which not only reversibly sequesters and stores CO2, but also catalytically converts it to a utility chemical. Their material offers significant technological advantages by coupling properties of fluidity, permanent porosity with catalysis. The hollow silica nanorods sequester and store the CO2 molecules, while the bio-conjugated carbonic anhydrase enzyme acts as catalyst for the conversion of CO2 to industrially relevant CaCO3 polymorphs. The liquid-like property of the material which has a room temperature viscosity equivalent to that of honey, is provided by the polymeric shell surrounding the nanoparticles and the enzyme. Further, by taking porous liquid droplets in two different compartments and creating an interface between them, the authors show diffusion of and ions across the interface to exemplify the liquid-like nature and the utility of the composite porous liquid. This piece of work provides significant development by imparting capability of deploying reactions in nanoparticulate based porous liquids thereby opening up new research avenues towards sustainability.
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