V. Van Speybroeck

Reticular materials rely on a unique building concept where inorganic and organic building units are stitched together giving access to an almost limitless number of structured ordered porous materials. Given the versatility of chemical elements, underlying nets, and topologies, reticular materials provide a unique platform to design materials for timely technological applications. Reticular materials have now found their way in important societal applications, like carbon capture to address climate change, water harvesting to extract atmospheric moisture in arid environments, and clean energy applications. Combining predictions from computational materials chemistry with advanced experimental characterization and synthesis procedures unlocks a design strategy to synthesize new materials with the desired properties and functions. Within this review, the current status of modeling reticular materials is addressed and supplemented with topical examples highlighting the necessity of advanced molecular modeling to design materials for technological applications. This review is structured as a templated molecular modeling study starting from the molecular structure of a realistic material towards the prediction of properties and functions of the materials. At the end, the authors provide their perspective on the past, present of future in modeling reticular materials and formulate open challenges to inspire future model and method developments.

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have emerged as photocatalytic materials with bandgaps in the visible region. Imine-based COFs, which have been extensively explored, often suffer from limited stability and poor conjugation, hindering their photocatalytic activities. The chemical and hydrolytic stability and the photo catalytic performance of COFs is drastically enhanced by constructing 2D COFs that are fully conjugated in the x, y plane, that have alternating donor–acceptor (D-A) units for better charge separation and that have enhanced conjugation in the z-axis by p-orbital overlap by using highly planar building blocks. In this study, we introduce three highly crystalline sp 2 COFs that are able to photocatalyticlly reduce highly toxic Cr (VI) species to much less toxic and easily removable Cr (III) residues, while simultaneously oxidizing water borne organic pollutants. One of them, the TEB-COF, with the integration of the acetylene group, exhibited excellent photocatalytic ac tivity due to its superior planarity and extended conjugation. TEB-COF is able to completely remove the model dye Rhodamine B and Cr (VI) (10 mg/L) in less than 30 min. This research provides valuable insights into the development of recyclable metal-free photocatalysts for wastewater treatment.

Metal halide perovskites (MHP) are highly promising semiconductors. In this study, we focus on FAPbBr₃ nanocrystals, which are of great interest for green light-emitting diodes. Structural parameters significantly impact the properties of MHPs and are linked to phase instability, which hampers long-term applications. Clearly, there is a need for local and precise characterization techniques at the atomic scale, such as transmission electron microscopy. Because of the high electron beam sensitivity of MHPs, these investigations are extremely challenging. Here, we applied a low-dose method based on four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy. We quantified the observed elongation of the projections of the Br atomic columns, suggesting an alternation in the position of the Br atoms perpendicular to the Pb–Br–Pb bonds. Together with molecular dynamics simulations, these results remarkably reveal local distortions in an on-average cubic structure. Additionally, this study provides an approach to prospectively investigating the fundamental degradation mechanisms of MHPs.

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Nanoporous materials in the form of metal−organicframeworks such as zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) arepromising membrane materials for the separation of hydrocarbonmixtures. To compute the adsorption isotherms in suchadsorbents, grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations have provento be very useful. The quality of these isotherms depends on theaccuracy of adsorbate−adsorbent interactions, which are mostlydescribed using force fields owing to their low computational cost.However, force field predictions of adsorption uptake often showdiscrepancies from experiments at low pressures, providing theneed for methods that are more accurate. Hence, in this work, wepropose and validate two novel methodologies for the ZIF-8/ethane and ethene systems; a benchmarking methodology toevaluate the performance of any given force field in describing adsorption in the low-pressure regime and a refinement procedure torescale the parameters of a force field to better describe the host−guest interactions and provide for simulation isotherms with closeagreement to experimental isotherms. Both methodologies were developed based on a reference Henry coefficient, computed withthe PBE-MBD functional using the importance sampling technique. The force field rankings predicted by the benchmarkingmethodology involve the comparison of force field derived Henry coefficients with the reference Henry coefficients and ranking theforce fields based on the disparities between these Henry coefficients. The ranking from this methodology matches the rankingsmade based on uptake disparities by comparing force field derived simulation isotherms to experimental isotherms in the low-pressure regime. The force field rescaling methodology was proven to refine even the worst performing force field in UFF/TraPPE.The uptake disparities of UFF/TraPPE improved from 197% and 194% to 11% and 21% for ethane and ethene, respectively. Theproposed methodology is applicable to predict adsorption across nanoporous materials and allows for rescaled force fields to reachquantum accuracy without the need for experimental input.