A crystalline compound catalyses the destruction of a nerve agent much faster than other clean-up chemicals do.
Omar Farha and Joseph Hupp at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and their colleagues studied a metal–organic framework (MOF) — a porous network of metal nodes linked by organic groups. They found that their zirconium-containing MOF (pictured) broke down half of a simulant of the chemical warfare agent DMNP in 15 minutes. Breakdown of 50% of the nerve agent GD took just 3 minutes.
Experiments and calculations showed that this MOF performs quickly because the zirconium ion active sites, which catalyse the breakdown reactions, are more easily reached by the nerve agents than in other MOFs.
Nature Mater. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat4238 (2015)
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Metal framework zaps nerve agents. Nature 519, 265 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/519265a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/519265a
