New Review on Fundamentals of Diffusion in Nanoporous Materials

An extensive review and perspective article on Connecting theory and simulation with experiment for the study of diffusion in nanoporous solids with >500 references has just appeared in the Adsorption journal (SpringerNature, Open Access) : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10450-021-00314-y .

The review was written by Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens (UCL), with Dr Brandon Bukowski and Professor Randy Snurr (Northwestern University, USA), Professor Frerich Keil (Hamburg University of Technology, Germany), Dr Peter Ravikovitch (ExxonMobil R&E, USA) and Dr German Sastre (ITQ, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain) and commissioned by IUPAC for a Special Issue on Diffusion in Nanoporous Solids on the initiative of Professor Jörg Kärger (University of Leipzig, Germany).

Covering fundamentals of nano-confinement on diffusion in zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), amorphous mesoporous materials, and hierarchically structured nanoporous materials, we survey historical and recent references, but also include our critical opinion on how to progress analytical theory and simulations for better experimental analysis, predicting diffusion under confinement and optimising transport in porous media. 

There are no more excuses to use tortuosity as a "fudge factor", is one of the key conclusions of the paper! 

Within the context of the CNIE, the multiscale simulation and theoretical techniques described in the review are helpful to underpin nature-inspired designs of hierarchically structured porous materials for catalysis and separations – much of the work related to the CNIE’s Theme 1 (Hierarchical Transport Networks) and Theme 2 (Force Balancing and Nano-Confinement Effects).

It has taken significant effort to write this review. We hope that this will be a useful resource for many years to come.

Reference: B.C. Bukowski, F.J. Keil, P.I. Ravikovitch, G. Sastre, R.Q. Snurr and M.-O. Coppens, 2021, Connecting theory and simulation with experiment for the study of diffusion in nanoporous solids. Adsorption.  DOI:10.1007/s10450-021-00314-y