Construction of porous ionic liquids based on coordination cages
The key objective of this fellowship proposal is to develop the first ever porous ionic liquid (PIL) at the molecular level and to explore their properties as Type I permanently porous liquids. Transition-metal coordination cages, in which organic ligands coordinate to metal cations to form a molecular capsule, will be used as scaffolds for permanently PIL. Such coordination cages have been developed by the Nitschke group.  In the target PIL, the cations will be coordination cages and will thus contain an empty cavity. The strategy employed to synthesize permanently PIL will be functionalizing a task-specific coordination cages with imidazole cations together with the selection of proper anions in order to liquefy coordination cages at room temperature . The researcher will also explore the guest encapsulation properties of these new liquid capsules by monitoring guest uptake in neat permanently porous liquid.