Porous materials play a significant role in modern chemistry and materials science; despite recent scientific interest, they have a history dating back to antiquity. Here the authors provide a brief overview of the past that has contributed to their evolution.
Scientific interest in porous materials has witnessed exceptional growth over the past few decades with the development of modern frameworks. However, it is important to appreciate that porous materials have been around for longer than we might initially think.
Reading about porous materials used in ancient Egypt for medicinal purposes ignited our curiosity about the history of this field. A quest for primary sources then led us down somewhat of a rabbit hole, but an enjoyable one nonetheless. We, therefore, aim to provide a brief chronicle of the evolution of porous material discovery from ancient remedies to modern frameworks (Fig. 1).
Ancient civilizations throughout the world used porous materials for medicine (left), and in the 18th century (middle), scientific study of these materials began. Modern scientific research has benefited and built upon this historical field and developed next-generation materials for applications such as carbon capture and clean energy (right). Note: Photographs of coal and natural zeolite used with the permission of Getty Images.
Scientific literature dating back to ancient Egyptian times is unsurprisingly scarce, as even the sturdiest papyri degrade over time. However, reports dating back to circa 1500 BC, in the Ebers papyrus, describe medical practices using porous charcoal for indigestion1. This describes the consumption of Egyptian ink, a mixture of charcoal suspended in gum Arabic slurry2.
The practical use of charcoal for its absorptive properties continued throughout antiquity and into the early modern era to treat gastrointestinal diseases. Pliny the Elder quoted the older Roman Scholar, Varro, “let the hearth be your medicine-box” when discussing charcoal3. The purification of water with charcoal is also reported in ancient Hindu sources4. The British navy, during early exploration, also used to char the interior of wooden barrels to improve the shelf life of potable water. However, the charcoal stained the water, making it less desirable5. The consumption of charcoal in the animal kingdom has also been observed, with theories suggesting that Zanzibar red colobus monkeys use it for the adsorption of phenolic compounds6. There is even evidence of charcoal consumption in a nodosaurid ankylosaur dinosaur specimen of the genus Borealopelta from the early cretaceous period7, although unfortunately, we do not know for sure if the consumption was intentional or not. Charcoal is still currently used as a feed additive for livestock to improve growth and health8. Other porous materials like kaolinite, a clay mineral, have been used by humans throughout the world for antidiarrheal properties, including the commercial medication Kaopectate9. Even into the late 20th century, raw kaolinite clays were sold in western African markets as oral antidiarrheal medicines10.
However, to start thinking of the scientific theories of absorption using porous materials, we must jump to 18th century Europe where Carl Scheele, a Swedish pharmaceutical chemist, studied the adsorption of gas within charcoal11. Scheele observed that upon heating in a vessel attached to a rubbery bladder, charcoal expelled adsorbed gases. He noted that the expansion of the bladder was well beyond that typically observed for heating a sealed vessel.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, there became a need for advanced filtration and purification systems. In particular, sugar from Caribbean plantations required excess refining12. Additionally, purification of the stomach through the adsorption of ingested poisons as anecdotes was widely reported. Some examples included the ingestion of arsenic trioxide by Michel Bertrand in 1811 and strychnine by Pierre-Fleurus Touéry around 1852, both followed by charcoal consumption13.
Meanwhile, in Tennessee, home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Lincoln County Process (as it would come to be known) used charcoal filtering to produce authentic Tennessee whiskey14. Carbon-based adsorptive materials gained popularity as the growing knowledge of germ theory in the late 19th century made beverage purification an increasingly hot topic15. Charcoal eventually made its way into the gas masks of World War I due to its improved adsorption capacity over the traditional cotton or fiber adsorbents16.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a surge of interest in science and technology. While charcoal was not as widely regarded as some of the new materials coming into the picture, researchers continued to study the essential absorptive properties. Perhaps one of the most important was studying its chemical structure, performed via X-ray diffraction by Rosalind Franklin17. Best known for her contributions to DNA structure, Franklin was also played a significant role in the modern scientific understanding of porous carbons, having conducted several analyses on these materials during the 1940s18.
At the same time, as some of the early research into charcoal adsorption, another class of porous materials, known as zeolites (derived from Greek “zeo” (to boil) and “lithos” (stone)), were gaining popularity in the scientific community. Natural zeolites, aluminosilicate mineral derivatives with highly ordered pores, were discovered in 1756 by Axel Fredrick Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist, also credited with the discovery of elemental nickel19. During his analysis, Cronstedt observed that upon heating two samples, mixtures of stilbite and stellerite, one from a mine in Sweden and one from Iceland20, he observed steam production. This sign we now recognize as zeolitic pores desorbing water19.
Within a few decades of William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg discovering X-ray diffraction, there were already reports using this new structural determination technique to analyze zeolites21, clays22, and carbons. Some of the earliest structural studies of porous materials were conducted in 1930 by future two-time Nobel Prize winner (Chemistry and Peace) Linus Pauling, who studied sodalite21 and the clay mineral mica23.
The first synthetic zeolites, lévyne or levynite, were produced over a century after their first discovery, in 1862 by Henri Sainte-Claire-Deville24. However, there was still little interest in these niche materials until Richard Barrer established the field of modern synthetic zeolite research in the 1940s25. Following on from Barrer’s work, in 1948, Robert M. Milton began studying industrial zeolite synthesis under the Union Carbide company26. Milton produced zeolites from soluble silicon and aluminum precursors, characterized by the recent adaptation of powder X-ray diffraction techniques, allowing quick and easy screening of synthesized materials. In 1951, Milton started pushing for the study and use of zeolites as catalysts because of their strong adsorptive properties and atomically precise chemistry26. Their initial work showed zeolites could be highly beneficial as hydrocarbon cracking catalysts, and by 1959, Zeolite Y was being used as a hydrocarbon isomerization catalyst26. This development resulted in a general explosion of zeolite research, with many highly regarded scientists, such as Donald Breck, Jule Rabo, and Edith Flanigen, studying them for the commodity chemical industry. Zeolite processes developed in the past fifty years include methanol to olefins and acid-catalyzed aromatic alkylation27.
Silica aerogel formation reports predate the widespread adoption of synthetic zeolites, with Samuel Kistler allegedly developing the first aerogel as part of a bet made with Charles Learned in 193128,29. Subsequently, more ordered mesoporous silicas were developed, namely the Mobile Composition of Matter (MCM) and Santa Barbara Amorphous (SBA) series of materials. Two notable examples, MCM-4130 and SBA-1531, were discovered in the 1990s and exceeded the pore size limits of zeolites (~2 nm) while taking advantage of the robust chemical benefits of silica.
Porous polymer networks (PPNs) also emerged around the late 1940s, with structures based on non-intrinsically porous polymeric systems of polystyrenes and sulfonated polystyrenes but were not heavily studied until the 21st century. PPNs take advantage of rigid organic functional group moieties of well-known geometries. Neil McKeown, an early PPN adsorption pioneer who first dubbed the term polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIMs)32, generated materials with specific pore sizes and high gas adsorption capacities.
By the late 1980s, it was apparent that coordination complexes and coordination polymers could be highly crystalline. Much of the early work on 2D and 3D crystalline coordination polymers came from Richard Robson33. Later, Susumu Kitagawa advanced the field by designing porous hybrid inorganic-organic materials throughout the 1980s and 1990s34. The development of porous coordination materials then grew in popularity with the development of stable and permanently porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) by Omar Yaghi in the late 1990s35.
MOF materials are promising candidates for gas adsorption, especially for carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen uptake. Recently, Omar Farha developed a material that reached the U.S. Department of Energy’s target performance for volumetric and gravimetric methane storage36. The explosion of interest in MOFs has also produced new materials based on many of the same principles, such as highly ordered porosity controlled through the self-correction of non-covalent interactions. Porous coordination cages (PCCs), first discovered in 1990 by Makoto Fujita37, are molecular analogs and allow for easy processability through solution-based approaches. The concept of PCCs was later combined with PIMs to develop permanently porous organic cages38.
Early catalytic applications of MOFs have focused on the metal centers or nodes of the material. The reactions primarily utilize the metal cations of the framework as Lewis acid catalysts. However, there was an understanding that the constrained pore sizes and organic functional groups could be used for chiral selectivity for enantioselective catalysis39. Further advancement in MOF catalysis came about not through the study of metal-based catalytic properties but by developing post-synthetic modification (PSM) in the mid-2000s40. PSM allows for the accessible introduction of functionality that can be utilized to perform additional chemical reactivity. There has also been growing interest in using MOF scaffolds for templation. The development of MOF-derived carbons (MOFdCs) was achieved by exploiting the high porosity of the parent structure as a template for producing highly stable, well-defined porous carbon41.
Other modern porous materials include covalent organic frameworks (COFs)42 and hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks (HOFs). The former is an emerging class of non-metal-containing analogs of MOFs. They show promise for many of the same applications but with the advantage of a fully covalently bound 2D or 3D organic structure, often with high levels of crystallinity and selectivity. The latter are a promising class of molecular materials that form porous frameworks through non-covalent hydrogen-bonding interactions43. These interactions often reduce the rigidity of highly porous HOFs, but many are soluble in organic solvents and, therefore, more processable and more readily regenerated in solution.
In many ways, the porous materials used in the pre-modern era seem unsophisticated and straightforward compared to the current state-of-the-art materials made with molecular-scale precision. However, despite the increase in material complexity, we are still using many of these materials for similar reasons. New experimental and computational techniques have enabled recent advances, improving our understanding and control of materials at the molecular level. In recent years, new techniques such as neutron scattering, pair distribution function analysis, high-performance computing, and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) have allowed for a better understanding of the structure and dynamics of materials at the molecular level. For example, cryo-EM allowed for the first direct visualization of gas molecules loaded into the pores of a MOF44. This proves that even in a field as old as porous materials, there are always new things to learn, and it is never too late to look back at some of the materials studied by previous generations with fresh eyes.
References
Bryan, C. P. Ancient Egyptian Medicine: The Papyrus Ebers. (Ares Chicago, 1974).
Partington, J. R. Origins and Development of Applied Chemistry (Longmans, Green & Co., 1935).
Secundus, C. P. in The Natural History of Pliny. (eds Bostock, J. & Riley, H. T.) 4 (HG Bohn, 1857).
Çeçen, F. & Aktaş, Ö. Water and Wastewater Treatment: Historical Perspective of Activated Carbon Adsorption and its Integration with Biological Processes. in Activated Carbon for Water and Wastewater Treatment. 1–11 (John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2011).
Diamond, E. M. & Farrer, K. T. H. Watering the fleet and the introduction of distillation. Mariner’s Mirror 91, 548–553 (2005).
Struhsaker, T. T., Cooney, D. O. & Siex, K. S. Charcoal consumption by Zanzibar red colobus monkeys: Its function and its ecological and demographic consequences. Int. J. Primatol. 18, 61–72 (1997).
Brown, C. M. et al. Dietary palaeoecology of an Early Cretaceous armoured dinosaur (Ornithischia; Nodosauridae) based on floral analysis of stomach contents. R. Soc. Open Sci. 7, 200305 (2020).
Schmidt, H. P., Hagemann, N., Draper, K. & Kammann, C. The use of biochar in animal feeding. Peerj 7, e7373 (2019).
Carretero, M. I. Clay minerals and their beneficial effects upon human health. A review. Appl. Clay Sci. 21, 155–163 (2002).
Vermeer, D. E. & Ferrell, R. E. Jr. Nigerian geophagical clay: a traditional antidiarrheal pharmaceutical. Science 227, 634–636 (1985).
Scheele, C. W. et al. Chemical Observations and Experiments on Air and Fire. (J. Johnson, 1780).
Deitz, V. R. Bibliography of Solid Adsorbents: An Annotative Bibliographical Survey of the Scientific Literature on Bone Char, Activated Carbons, and Other Technical Solid Adsorbents, for the Years 1900 to 1942 Inclusive. (National Bureau of Standards, 1944).
Juurlink, D. N. Activated charcoal for acute overdose: a reappraisal. Br. J. Clin. Pharmacol. 81, 482–487 (2016).
Kerley, T. & Munafo, J. P. Jr Changes in Tennessee Whiskey Odorants by the Lincoln County Process. J. Agric. Food Chem. 68, 9759–9767 (2020).
Woodhead, G. S. & Wood, G. E. C. An inquiry into the relative efficiency of water filters in the prevention of infective disease. Br. Medical J. 2, 1053–1059 (1894).
Spiers, E. M. in The Gas War, 1915–1918: If not a War Winner, Hardly a Failure, One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences, Cham, 2017//. (eds Friedrich, B. et al.) 153–168 (Springer International Publishing, 2017).
Franklin, R. E. Crystallite growth in graphitizing and non-graphitizing carbons. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. A 209, 196 (1951). &.
Franklin, R. E. A study of the fine structure of carbonaceous solids by measurements of true and apparent densities. Part I. Coals. Transac. Faraday Soc. 45, 274–286 (1949).
Cronstedt, A. F., Schlenker, J. L. & Kühl, G. H. Observations and descriptions. in Proceedings from the Ninth International Zeolite Conference. (eds von Ballmoos, R., Higgins, J. B. & Treacy, M. M. J.) 3-9 (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1993).
Colella, C. & Gualtieri, A. F. Cronstedt’s zeolite. Microporous Mesoporous Mater. 105, 213–221 (2007).
Pauling, L. The structure of some sodium and calcium aluminosilicates. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 16, 453–9 (1930).
Hadding, A. IV Eine röntgenographische Methode kristalline und kryptokristalline Substanzen zu identifizieren. Zeitschrift für Kristallographie - Crystalline Materials 58, 108–112 (1923).
Pauling, L. The structure of the micas and related minerals. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 16, 123–9 (1930).
Sainte-Claire-Deville, M. H. Chimie Minéralogique—Reproduction de la Lévyne. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences 54, 324–327 (1862).
Lovat, V. C. R. Richard Maling Barrer. 16 June 1910-12 September 1996. Biograph. Memoirs Fellows Royal Soci. 44, 37–49 (1998).
Milton, R. M. Molecular sieve science and technology. In Zeolite Synthesis. Vol. 398, (eds. Occelli, M. L. & Robson, H. E.) 1–10 (American Chemical Society, 1989).
Jan, D.-Y., Johnson, J. A., Schmidt, R. J. & Woodle, G. B. Alkylation process using UZM-8 zeolite. U.S. Patent WO2007005317A3, April 12, 2007.
Barron, R. F. & Nellis, G. F. Cryogenic Heat Transfer (CRC Press, 2017).
Kistler, S. S. Coherent expanded aerogels and jellies. Nature 127, 741–741 (1931).
Kresge, C. T., Leonowicz, M. E., Roth, W. J., Vartuli, J. C. & Beck, J. S. Ordered mesoporous molecular-sieves synthesized by a liquid-crystal template mechanism. Nature 359, 710–712 (1992).
Zhao, D. et al. Triblock copolymer syntheses of mesoporous silica with periodic 50 to 300 angstrom pores. Science 279, 548–52 (1998).
McKeown, N. B. et al. Towards polymer-based hydrogen storage materials: engineering ultramicroporous cavities within polymers of intrinsic microporosity. Angew Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 45, 1804–7 (2006).
Richard Robson, Brendan F. Abrahams, Stuart R. Batten, Robert W. Gable, Bernard F. Hoskins & Jianping Liu, Crystal engineering of novel materials composed of infinite two- and three-dimensional frameworks. in Supramolecular Architecture. Vol. 499, (eds Bein, T.) 256–273 (American Chemical Society, 1992).
Munakata, M., Kuroda-Sowa, T., Maekawa, M., Honda, A. & Kitagawa, S. Building a two-dimensional co-ordination polymer having a multilayered arrangement. A molecular assembly comprising hanging phenazine molecules between polymeric stair frameworks of copper(I) halides. J. Chem. Soc., Dalton Transac. 1994, 2771–2775 (1994).
Li, H., Eddaoudi, M., O’Keeffe, M. & Yaghi, O. M. Design and synthesis of an exceptionally stable and highly porous metal-organic framework. Nature 402, 276–279 (1999).
Chen, Z. et al. Balancing volumetric and gravimetric uptake in highly porous materials for clean energy. Science 368, 297–303 (2020).
Fujita, M., Yazaki, J. & Ogura, K. Preparation of a macrocyclic polynuclear complex, [(en)Pd(4,4’-bpy)]4(NO3)8 (en = ethylenediamine, bpy = bipyridine), which recognizes an organic molecule in aqueous media. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 112, 5645–5647 (1990).
Tozawa, T. et al. Porous organic cages. Nat. Mater. 8, 973–8 (2009).
Seo, J. S. et al. A homochiral metal-organic porous material for enantioselective separation and catalysis. Nature 404, 982–6 (2000).
Wang, Z. & Cohen, S. M. Postsynthetic modification of metal-organic frameworks. Chem. Soc. Rev. 38, 1315–29 (2009).
Liu, B., Shioyama, H., Akita, T. & Xu, Q. Metal-organic framework as a template for porous carbon synthesis. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 130, 5390–1 (2008).
Cote, A. P. et al. Porous, crystalline, covalent organic frameworks. Science 310, 1166–70 (2005).
Li, P., Ryder, M. R. & Stoddart, J. F. Hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks: a rising class of porous molecular materials. Accounts Mater. Res. 1, 77–87 (2020).
Li, Y. Z. et al. Cryo-EM structures of atomic surfaces and host-guest chemistry in metal-organic frameworks. Matter 1, 428–438 (2019).
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Jill Hemman (ORNL) for helping with the graphic design. G.S.D., H.F.D., and M.R.R. acknowledge the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program for funding. The SCGSR program is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) for the DOE under contract number DE-SC0014664. M.R.R. also acknowledges the DOE Office of Science (Basic Energy Sciences) for research funding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
G.S.D. designed the topic of the article under the supervision of H.C.Z. and M.R.R. G.S.D., H.F.D., and M.R.R. wrote the article.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Day, G.S., Drake, H.F., Zhou, HC. et al. Evolution of porous materials from ancient remedies to modern frameworks. Commun Chem 4, 114 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-021-00549-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-021-00549-4
This article is cited by
-
On the role of the microstructure in the deformation of porous solids
npj Computational Materials (2022)