Molecular Minerals Discovery

New grant awarded to fund research into molecular iron oxides

The Leverhulme Trust has funded a project that aims to discover and characterise molecular iron oxides with potential applications ranging from catalysis and battery technologies to information storage.

The team, led by Professors Euan BrechinNeil McKeown and Simon Parsons, will build on the recent discoveries of molecular oxy-hydroxides whose structures conform to the minerals ferrihydrite and magnetite. The research will examine how these molecules grow, establish methods for making complexes with a variety of nuclearities and topologies, design hybrid iron polyoxometalates and use porous materials to seed the growth of molecules containing hundreds of metal ions within the cavities of phthalocyanine unsolvated nanoporous crystals.

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