Porous organic materials have garnered colossal interest with the scientific fraternity due to their excellent gas sorption performances, catalytic abilities, energy storage capacities, and other intriguing applications. This review encompasses the recent significant breakthroughs and the conventional functions and practices in the field of porous organic materials to find useful applications and imparts a comprehensive understanding of the strategic evolution of the design and synthetic approaches of porous organic materials with tunable characteristics. We present an exhaustive analysis of the design strategies with special emphasis on the topologies of crystalline and amorphous porous organic materials. In addition to elucidating the structure-function correlation and state-of-the-art applications of porous organic materials, we address the challenges and restrictions that prevent us from realizing porous organic materials with tailored structures and properties for useful applications.

The search for new types of membrane materials has been of continuous interest in both academia and industry, given their importance in a plethora of applications, particularly for energy-efficient separation technology. In this contribution, we demonstrate for the first time that a metal-organic framework (MOF) can be grown on the covalent-organic framework (COF) membrane to fabricate COF-MOF composite membranes. The resultant COF-MOF composite membranes demonstrate higher separation selectivity of H2/CO2 gas mixtures than the individual COF and MOF membranes. A sound proof for the synergy between two porous materials is the fact that the COF-MOF composite membranes surpass the Robeson upper bound of polymer membranes for mixture separation of a H2/CO2 gas pair and are among the best gas separation MOF membranes reported thus far.

Self-assembled crystalline porous organic salts (CPOSs) formed by an acid-base combination and with one-dimensional polar channels containing water molecules have been synthesized. The water content in the channels of the porous salts plays an important role in the proton conduction performance of the materials. The porous salts described in this study feature high proton conductivity at ambient conditions and can reach as high as 2.2×10 S cm at 333 K and under high humid conditions. This is among the best conductivity values reported to date for porous materials, for example, metal-organic frameworks and hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks. These materials exhibiting permanent porosity represent a group of porous materials and may find interesting applications in proton-exchange membrane fuel cells.

Endowed with chiral channels and pores, chiral metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly useful; however, their synthesis remains a challenge given that most chiral building blocks are expensive. Although MOFs with induced chirality have been reported to avoid this shortcoming, no study providing evidence for the ee value of such MOFs has yet been reported. We herein describe the first study on the efficiency of chiral induction in MOFs using inexpensive achiral building blocks and fully recoverable chiral dopants to control the handedness of racemic MOFs. This method yielded chirality-enriched MOFs with accessible pores. The ability of the materials to form host-guest complexes was probed with enantiomers of varying size and coordination and in solvents with varying polarity. Furthermore, mixed-matrix membranes (MMMs) composed of chirality-enriched MOF particles dispersed in a polymer matrix demonstrated a new route for chiral separation.

We report the first organically synthesized sp-sp hybridized porous carbon, OSPC-1. This new carbon shows electron conductivity, high porosity, the highest uptake of lithium ions of any carbon material to-date, and the ability to inhibit dangerous lithium dendrite formation. The new carbon exhibits exceptional potential as anode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) with high capacity, excellent rate capability, long cycle life, and potential for improved safety performance.

In the last few years, the scientific community has capitalized on the synergy between different porous materials to develop mixed matrix- and composite membranes with unprecedented performance in gas separation. Admirably, several of these membranes have outperformed the trade-off between permeability and selectivity, and it is reasonable to suggest that these membranes owe their performance to the synergy between different porous materials that these membranes comprise. However, covalent-organic frameworks (COFs) are rather underexplored in the fabrication of composite membranes particularly due to the fabrication challenges. Herein, we report a continuous and uniform layer of COF-300 grown on a UiO-66 membrane to develop the [COF-300]-[UiO-66] composite membrane that exhibits outstandingly high permeability together with excellent H2/CO2 separation selectivity.

Covalent organic framework (COF) membranes have emerged as state-of-the-art membranes with exceptional gas separation performances. However, the COF membranes are restricted to three-dimensional (3D) COFs, while the two-dimensional (2D) COF membrane remains a relatively uncharted territory. In addition, the major part of the scientific fraternity working in this field shares the dream to prepare 2D COF membranes with crystallographic preferential orientation. Here, we present a general strategy for the fabrication of oriented 2D COF membranes which is based on the incorporation of an intermediate metal-organic framework (MOF) layer. The 2D COF membrane is endowed with real ordered one-dimensional (1D) channels. This specially designed membrane that comprises two judiciously selected porous frameworks shows ultrahigh gas permeability and selectivity far surpassing the present Robeson upper bound. This contribution paves a new avenue to explore oriented 2D COF membranes as prospective high-performing membranes rendering a sustainable route for H 2 /CO 2 separation.

In the wake of shaping the energy future through materials innovation, lithium–sulfur batteries (LSBs) are top-of-the-line energy storage system attributed to their high theoretical energy density and specific capacity inclusive of low material costs. Despite their strengths, LSBs suffer from the cross-over of soluble polysulfide redox species to the anode, entailing fast capacity fading and inferior cycling stability. Adding to the concern, the insulating character of polysulfides lends to sluggish reaction kinetics. To address these challenges, we construct optimized polysulfide blockers-cum-conversion catalysts by accommodating the battery separator with covalent organic framework@Graphene (COF@G) composites. We settle on a crystalline TAPP-ETTB COF in the interest of its nitrogen-enriched scaffold with a regular pore geometry, providing ample lithiophilic sites for strong chemisorption and catalytic effect to polysulfides. On another front, graphene enables high electron mobility, boosting the sulfur redox kinetics. Consequently, a lithium–sulfur battery with a TAPP-ETTB COF@G-based separator demonstrates a high reversible capacity of 1489.8 mA h g–1 at 0.2 A g–1 after the first cycle and good cyclic performance (920 mA h g–1 after 400 cycles) together with excellent rate performance (827.7 mA h g–1 at 2 A g–1). The scope and opportunities to harness the designability and synthetic structural control in crystalline organic materials is a promising domain at the interface of sustainable materials, energy storage, and Li–S chemistry.