On June 26th, Omar M. Yaghi, a prestigious chemist from the United States, delivered a speech titled “Inventing New Materials” at the Luojia Forum.
Yaghi first reviewed several important materials in the 20th century before elaborating on a new material in the 21st century, the MOFs (Mental-Organic Frameworks). MOFs is a kind of molecular structures creating a porous material. Through a combination of various types of metal ions and organic bridging ligands, the material forms a three-dimensional expansion structure, which has rich features.
Yaghi introduced the new material based on the discovery of the MOFs’ porosity which led to the redesigning of MOFs’ structure conducted by his experienced research team. He pointed out that as the specific surface area in MOFs is up to 10000m2g-1, the material has potential application in hydrogen storage, natural gas storage and carbon dioxide adsorption.
After the lecture, professors and students at Wuhan University discussed the research and application of MOFs with Prof. Yaghi.
Zhang Lina, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, conferred the certificate of Wuhan University’s visiting professor to Professor Yaghi.
Omar M. Yaghi is the Dean of the Chemistry department at the University of California-Berkeley and the Director of the Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the creator of MOFs and COFs (Covalent Organic Frameworks). He has made great contributions to materials used in hydrogen storage. Since 1998, Prof. Yaghi has been chosen as one of the top ten influential world chemists every single year. In 2010, Prof. Yaghi’s H-index was 220, ranking the second among the top chemists.
(Rewritten by Yue Rao, edited by Diana & Sijia Hu)
