Inorganic ionic polymerization: From biomineralization to materials manufacturing

Constructing vacancy-rich metal phosphates by the spatial effect of ionic oligomers for enhanced OER activity

“…The generality of ionic oligomers in making diverse transition metal phosphates with rich vacancies ensures this strategy to be a fundamental methodology, which may be widely applied in industrial fields. Moreover, considering the generality of making inorganic ionic compound as inorganic ionic oligomers, 44 this method is extendable to even more inorganic materials with structural vacancies. This work provides insights into the structural design of solid materials through inorganic ionic oligomers via a non-classical crystallization pathway, and holds promise for offering a universal strategy for structural vacancy design, which may favour the fields of catalysts, battery electrodes, separation materials, optical materials, etc.…”

“…In our previous work, we prepared stable inorganic ionic oligomers, 42 which acted as building blocks for the crosslinking of bulk inorganic materials. 43,44 The inorganic ionic oligomer could be regarded as a molecule which is composed of multiple cations and anions, 45 and its size could vary between 1 and 2 nm, which is larger than mono-ions. It could be roughly estimated that the gap-size between closely packed ionic oligomers is approximately 6 Å, which is close to the size of two hydroxyl ions (Scheme 1b).…”

Applications of amorphous inorganics as novel functional materials

“…Inorganic ionic polymerization is a synthesised strategy from the reaction between ionic oligomers, favouriting the fabrication of an amorphous solid. [141][142][143] Our group provides the first example using calcium carbonate (CaCO 3 ). Typically, stabilized oligomeric CaCO 3 clusters were obtained by hydrogen bond-based end-capping (Fig.…”

“…For instance, the understanding of inorganic ionic oligomers with adjustable molecular weights and crosslinking properties has been a significant development in material design. 141 Through organic-inorganic copolymerization, a polyacrylamide-calcium phosphate oligomer (CPO) with a uniformly structured composition has been synthesized to provide exceptional hardness. 170 Additionally, an amorphous oligomer of calcium phosphate (CaP) has been employed to produce a hybrid mineral (HM).…”