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Functional materials discovery using energy–structure–function maps

Abstract

Molecular crystals cannot be designed in the same manner as macroscopic objects, because they do not assemble according to simple, intuitive rules. Their structures result from the balance of many weak interactions, rather than from the strong and predictable bonding patterns found in metal–organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks. Hence, design strategies that assume a topology or other structural blueprint will often fail. Here we combine computational crystal structure prediction and property prediction to build energy–structure–function maps that describe the possible structures and properties that are available to a candidate molecule. Using these maps, we identify a highly porous solid, which has the lowest density reported for a molecular crystal so far. Both the structure of the crystal and its physical properties, such as methane storage capacity and guest-molecule selectivity, are predicted using the molecular structure as the only input. More generally, energy–structure–function maps could be used to guide the experimental discovery of materials with any target function that can be calculated from predicted crystal structures, such as electronic structure or mechanical properties.

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Figure 1: Candidate building blocks for porous solids.
Figure 2: From structure prediction to energy–structure–function (ESF) maps.
Figure 3: ESF maps for T2.
Figure 4: Predicted and experimental structures and gas adsorption isotherms for polymorphs of T2.
Figure 5: Crystal structure stability and solvent stabilization.
Figure 6: Predicted and experimental structures and properties for

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC through grant agreement numbers 321156 (ERC-AG-PE5-ROBOT) and 307358 (ERC-stG-2012-ANGLE), and EPSRC (grants EP/N004884/1, EP/K018396/1 and EP/K018132/1) for funding. This work made use of the facilities of N8 HPC Centre of Excellence, provided and funded by the N8 consortium and EPSRC (grant number EP/K000225/1). T.H. thanks the Royal Society for a University Research Fellowship. We thank Diamond Light Source for access to beamlines I19 (MT8728) and I11 (EE12336). We thank the Advanced Light Source, supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the US Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231, and S. J. Teat and K. J. Gagnon for their assistance. We acknowledge the ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service via the UK’s HEC Materials Chemistry Consortium membership and a Programme Grant, which are funded by EPSRC (grants EP/L000202 and EP/N004884), and use of the IRIDIS High Performance Computing Facility at the University of Southampton.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

A.P. performed the CSPs. T.K. synthesized T2 and isolated T2-γ. L.C. carried out the methane and hydrogen capacity simulations, the Qst calculations, the hydrocarbon separation simulations, the adsorption isotherm simulations and the IAST calculations. D.H. analysed the pore geometries for the predicted structures, produced most of the ESF maps and wrote scripts to analyse the data. S.Y.C. and M.A.L. isolated T2-β and T2-δ and carried out the PXRD experiments. S.Y.C. analysed the hydrogen-bonding patterns for T2. B.J.S. synthesized T1, T2 and T2E. B.B. developed the initial synthetic route to T2E. D.P.M. carried out the molecular dynamics stability and solvent stabilization calculations. M.A.L., C.J.S. and A.S. collected single-crystal X-ray diffraction data and solved the structures; M.A.L., S.Y.C., A.S. and B.J.S. performed experiments on the stability of various phases. M.A.L. isolated T2E-α, solved its crystal structure and led the single-crystal diffraction work. T.K., C.M.K. and B.J.S. carried out crystallization and sublimation studies for T1 and T2. T.K., R.C., M.A.L., A.S. and T.H. collected and interpreted the gas sorption isotherms. A.I.C. and G.M.D. conceived the project and the concept of ESF maps, and led the writing of the manuscript with contributions from all co-authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Graeme M. Day.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Reviewer Information Nature thanks R. Catlow and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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This file contains Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Text and Data, Supplementary Figures 1-89, Supplementary Tables 1-12 and additional references. (PDF 15898 kb)

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Pulido, A., Chen, L., Kaczorowski, T. et al. Functional materials discovery using energy–structure–function maps. Nature 543, 657–664 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21419

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