Synthetic Materials Set New World Record For Greatest Amount of Surface Area 96
Zothecula writes "Researchers at Northwestern University, Illinois, have broken a world record in the creation of two synthetic materials, named NU-109 and NU-110, which have the greatest amount of surface areas of any material to date (abstract). To put this into perspective: if one were able to take a crystal of NU-110 the size of a grain of salt, and somehow unfold it, the surface area would cover a desktop. Additionally, the internal surface area of just one gram of the new material would cover one-and-a-half football fields."
Re:What are the implications? (Score:4, Informative)
Catalysis, gas storage, filtering, scaffolds for molecular construction etc.
Extremely high surface area materials are already extensively used in chemistry for this sort of thing.
A video about MOFs (Score:3, Informative)