Fabrication of hollow microporous organic capsules (HMOCs) could be very useful because of their hollow and porous morphology, which combines the advantages of both microporous organic polymers and non-porous nanocapsules. They can be used as storage materials or reaction chambers while supplying the necessary path for the design of controlled uptake/release systems. Herein, the synthesis of HMOCs with high surface area through facile emulsion polymerization and hypercrosslinking reactions, is described. Due to their tailored porous structure, these capsules possessed high drug loading efficiency, zero-order drug release kinetics and are also demonstrated to be used as nanoscale reactors for the prepareation of nanoparticles (NPs) without any external stabilizer. Moreover, owing to their intrinsic biocompatibility and fluorescence, these capsules exhibit promising prospect for biomedical applications.

Direct structural information of confined CO2 in a micropore is important for elucidating its specific binding or activation mechanism. However, weak gas-binding ability and/or poor sample crystallinity after guest exchange hindered the development of efficient materials for CO2 incorporation, activation and conversion. Here, we present a dynamic porous coordination polymer (PCP) material with local flexibility, in which the propeller-like ligands rotate to permit CO2 trapping. This process can be characterized by X-ray structural analysis. Owing to its high affinity towards CO2 and the confinement effect, the PCP exhibits high catalytic activity, rapid transformation dynamics, even high size selectivity to different substrates. Together with an excellent stability with turnover numbers (TON) of up to 39,000 per Zn1.5 cluster of catalyst after 10 cycles for CO2 cycloaddition to form value-added cyclic carbonates, these results demonstrate that such distinctive structure is responsible for visual CO2 capture and size-selective conversion.

Hierarchical porous polystyrene monoliths (HCP-PolyHIPE) are obtained by hypercrosslinking poly(styrene-divinylbenzene) monoliths prepared by polymerization of high internal phase emulsions (PolyHIPEs). The hypercrosslinking is achieved using an approach known as knitting which employs formaldehyde dimethyl acetal (FDA) as an external crosslinker. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) confirms that the macroporous structure in the original monolith is retained during the knitting process. By increasing the amount of divinylbenzene (DVB) in PolyHIPE, the BET surface area and pore volume of the HCP-PolyHIPE decrease, while the micropore size increases. BET surface areas of 196-595 m(2) g(-1) are obtained. The presence of micropores, mesopores, and macropores is confirmed from the pore size distribution. With a hierarchical porous structure, the monoliths reveal comparable gas sorption properties and potential applications in oil spill clean-up.

Aquaporin proteins are of great interest to the membrane science community because of their unique characteristics of high water permeability and perfect molecular selectivity. Although these characteristics make aquaporins particularly valuable for desalination applications, none of these aquaporin-based membrane designs has been produced at a large scale. In this work, we report on the recently designed and commercially available Aquaporin Inside flat-sheet membrane designed for forward osmosis (FO) by Aquaporin A/S, Lyngby, Denmark. The Aquaporin Inside flat-sheet membrane is the first commercially available thin-film composite (TFC) FO membrane to incorporate aquaporin proteins into its polyamide-based selective layer. The membrane tested, which is a first-generation membrane, achieved water fluxes of 14.0 and 8.8 L m–2 h–1 with low reverse salt fluxes of 4.6 and 4.0 g m–2 h–1 in pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) and FO modes, respectively, using 1.0 M sodium chloride as the draw solution and deionized water as the feed solution. The membrane structural parameter was calculated to be 630 μm, which is similar to those of existing commercial membrane options for FO. The Aquaporin Inside membrane was found to exhibit water and reverse solute flux performances similar to those of other commercially available varieties, although this membrane represents one of the few TFC membranes that is available to the academic community for FO testing at the time of this writing.

We report the first study of large-scale polymer membranes with <1.27-nm-diameter aligned carbon nanotubes.