The customisability of metal–-organic frameworks (MOFs) has attracted exponentially growing interest in the realm of materials science. Because of their porous nature, MOF research has been primarily focused on gas...

Zr-oxide secondary building units construct metal–organic framework (MOF) materials with excellent gas adsorption properties and high mechanical, thermal, and chemical stability. These attributes have led Zr-oxide MOFs to be well-recognized for a wide range of applications, including gas storage and separation, catalysis, as well as healthcare domain. Here, we report structure search methods within the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) to create a curated subset of 102 Zr-oxide MOFs synthesized to date, bringing a unique record for all researchers working in this area. For the identified structures, we manually corrected the proton topology of hydroxyl and water molecules on the Zr-oxide nodes and characterized their textural properties, Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) area, and topology. Importantly, we performed systematic periodic density functional theory (DFT) calculations comparing 25 different combinations of basis sets and functionals to calculate framework partial atomic charges for use in gas adsorption simulations. Through experimental verification of CO2 adsorption in selected Zr-oxide MOFs, we demonstrate the sensitivity of CO2 adsorption predictions at the Henry’s regime to the choice of the DFT method for partial charge calculations. We characterized Zr-MOFs for their CO2 adsorption performance via high-throughput grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations and revealed how the chemistry of the Zr-oxide node could have a significant impact on CO2 uptake predictions. We found that the maximum CO2 uptake is obtained for structures with the heat of adsorption values >25 kJ/mol and the largest cavity diameters of ca. 6–7 Å. Finally, we introduced augmented reality (AR) visualizations as a means to bring adsorption phenomena alive in porous adsorbents and to dynamically explore gas adsorption sites in MOFs.

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has grown exponentially within the field of structure property predictions in materials science. In this issue of Patterns, Ahmed and Siegel scrutinize several redeveloped ML techniques for systematic investigations of over 900,000 metal-organic framework (MOF) structures, taken from 19 databases, to discover new, potentially record-breaking, hydrogen-storage materials.

The vastness of materials space, particularly that which is concerned with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), creates the critical problem of performing efficient identification of promising materials for specific applications. Although high-throughput computational approaches, including the use of machine learning, have been useful in rapid screening and rational design of MOFs, they tend to neglect descriptors related to their synthesis. One way to improve the efficiency of MOF discovery is to data mine published MOF papers to extract the materials informatics knowledge contained within the journal articles. Here, by adapting the chemistry-aware natural language processing tool, ChemDataExtractor (CDE), we generated an open-source database of MOFs focused on their synthetic properties: the DigiMOF database. Using the CDE web scraping package alongside the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) MOF subset, we automatically downloaded 43,281 unique MOF journal articles, extracted 15,501 unique MOF materials and text mined over 52,680 associated properties including synthesis method, solvent, organic linker, metal precursor, and topology. This centralised, structured database reveals the MOF synthetic data embedded within thousands of MOF publications. The DigiMOF database and associated software are publicly available for other researchers to conduct further analysis of alternative MOF production pathways and create additional parsers to search for other desirable properties.

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