Porous Liquids Based on Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Nano- and Microarchitectures

Porous liquids with permanent porosity are a new area of materials science, which should exhibit attractive properties to open up long-term applications in chemical processes. However, since 2007 when the idea was firstly put forward, these unique porous materials remained essentially hypothetical. The creation of permanent pores in dense liquid state is much more challenging than that in rigid solids, owing to the loose packing of liquid molecules with free to move properties. As proposed, the homogeneous incorporation of rigid porous solids into the liquid phase to afford permanent porosity is a promising synthetic strategy toward porous liquids fabrication. Unfortunately, there are a number of challenges associated with creating porous liquid, such as intermolecular self-filling, easy collapse or decomposition of the organic hosts, and serious settling of nanoparticles. Very recently, the development of supramolecular chemistry based on hierarchical assembly of nanoscale elements into three-dimensional, complex nano- and microarchitectures gives birth to a great opportunity to address the above issues for porous liquid fabrication. Here, porous liquids based on the rationally designed complex, hierarchical architecture with robust porous structure are presented along with potential applications such as gas separations.