Advanced Porous Materials: Design, Synthesis, and Applications in Sustainability

P orosity is inherent in nature and can be found in rocks, soils, biological tissue, and zeolites.Exploitation of porosity in materials has permitted diverse applications such as filtration, separation, sensing, and petrochemicals.The exquisite control over the order and functionality of porous structures allows the tailoring of materials for challenging applications.This tunability is facilitated by the expanding utilization of structure-encoding molecular building blocks to impose local and extended order in porous materials.The study of advanced porous materials (APMs), encompassing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), covalent organic frameworks (COFs), porous organic polymers (POPs), and others, has progressed rapidly in the past few decades.On the applications front, APMs have the potential to redefine numerous domains related to energy and environment.However, the synthesis of remarkably complex functional structures requires potentially elaborate synthetic procedures deserving careful sustainability and life-cycle analyses.In this Virtual Special Issue "Advanced Porous Materials: Design, Synthesis, and Applications in Sustainability" in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, over 40 articles, letters, and perspectives have been curated to evoke a cradle-to-grave outlook on the applications and synthetic methods of APMs (http://axial.acs.org/2019/05/06/advanced-porous-materi-als).A brief overview of research topics covered by this issue is presented below.Adsorptive Separation.Adsorptive separations such as CO 2 capture and hydrocarbons separation have been the research focus in APMs since their early stages of development.By virtue of judicious engineering of the functionalities, defect concentrations, pore size, pore shape, and pore volume, the interactions between APMs and target adsorbates could be carefully adjusted to cater to different separation demands.For instance, Xing et al. regulate the pore size of the ultramicroporous MOF ZU-66 by the temporarily frozen molecular rotors embedded in the ligand 4,4′-bipyridylacetylene and studied the MOF performance for carbon capture in relevant gas mixtures (DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b04916).Loading guests into the pores of APMs may also lead to enhanced gas separation performance.Zou et al. achieve substantially enhanced CO 2 uptake performance in the highly porous MIL-101(Cr) by loading a series of alkyl amines using a doublesolvent method (DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b03597).Aside from gas phase applications, APMs with hydrothermal stability may be utilized as water pollutant adsorbents for wastewater remediation, which is covered in the perspective by Ghosh et al. (DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b00155) with promise for other applications that promote sustainable chemistry and engineering.Membrane Separation.APM polycrystalline membranes can outperform traditional polymeric membranes as evidenced by the excellent membrane permeability and selectivity beyond the Robeson upper bound.In this VSI, Agrawal et al. review the factors affecting the membrane performance, such as the