Abstract

Porous salts have recently emerged as a promising new class of ultra tunable permanently micro porous solids. These adsorbents, which were first reported as ionic solids based on porous cations and anions, can be isolated from a wide variety of charged, permanently porous coordination cages. A challenge in realizing the full tunability of such systems, however, lies in the fact that the majority of coordination cages for which surface areas have been reported are comprised of charge-balanced inorganic and organic building blocks that result in neutral cages. As such, most reported permanently porous coordination cages cannot be used as reagents in the synthesis of porous salts. At a practical level, the TBAX/cage reactions, which are fully reversible upon isolation of the cage with the appropriate solvent, solubilize otherwise rigorously insoluble cages.