title: In silico design of porous polymer networks: high-throughput screening for methane storage materials.
abstract: Porous polymer networks (PPNs) are a class of advanced porous materials that combine the advantages of cheap and stable polymers with the high surface areas and tunable chemistry of metal-organic frameworks. They are of particular interest for gas separation or storage applications, for instance, as methane adsorbents for a vehicular natural gas tank or other portable applications. PPNs are self-assembled from distinct building units; here, we utilize commercially available chemical fragments and two experimentally known synthetic routes to design in silico a large database of synthetically realistic PPN materials. All structures from our database of 18,000 materials have been relaxed with semiempirical electronic structure methods and characterized with Grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulations for methane uptake and deliverable (working) capacity. A number of novel structure-property relationships that govern methane storage performance were identified. The relationships are translated into experimental guidelines to realize the ideal PPN structure. We found that cooperative methane-methane attractions were present in all of the best-performing materials, highlighting the importance of guest interaction in the design of optimal materials for methane storage.
authors.affiliation: Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , Berkeley, California 94720, United States.
authors.forename: Richard L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Cory M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.forename: Berend
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Smit
authors.forename: Maciej
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Haranczyk