Precision Covalent Organic Frameworks for Surface Nucleation Control

Abstract

Unwanted accumulation of ice and lime scale crystals on surfaces is a long‐standing challenge with major economic and sustainability implications. Passive inhibition of icing and scaling by liquid‐repellent surfaces are often inadequate, susceptible to surface failure under harsh conditions, and unsuitable for long‐term/real‐life usages. Such surfaces often require a multiplicity of additional features such as optical transparency, robust impact resistance, and ability to prevent contamination from low surface energy liquids. Unfortunately, most promising advances have relied on using perfluoro compounds, which are bio‐persistent and/or highly toxic. Here it is shown that organic, reticular mesoporous structures, covalent organic frameworks (COFs), may offer a solution. By exploiting simple and scalable synthesis of defect‐free COFs and rational post‐synthetic functionalization, nanocoatings with precision nanoporosity (morphology) are prepared that can inhibit nucleation at the molecular level without compromising the related contamination prevention and robustness. The results offer a simple strategy to exploit the nanoconfinement effect, which remarkably delays the nucleation of ice and scale formation on surfaces. Ice nucleation is suppressed down to −28 °C, scale formation is avoided for >2 weeks in supersaturated conditions, and jets of organic solvents impacting at Weber numbers >105 are resisted with surfaces that also offer optical transparency (>92%).

UV-Vis quantification of the iron content in iteratively steam and HCl purified single-walled carbon nanotubes

“…Nanotechnology offers new strategies to improve or even overcome some of the limitations of traditional materials [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Among the different types of nanomaterials, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can be employed in a wide variety of applications that range from nanoelectronics, sensors, catalysis, composite materials and cancer therapy to name some [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”