Nanoporous, polymeric coordination network structures are of considerable interest in the field of new materials with potential applications such as molecular selection, ion exchange, catalysis or gas adsorption. In general such materials are prepared using transition metals and bipyridines or carboxylate ligands. We are using chiral coordination complexes as the nodes, and metal hexa- and tetra- and di-cyanometallates as bridging units. In this way we can build chiral 1D, 2D and 3D coordination polymers. These new materials are characterized by using X-ray crystallography for both the single crystals and the powders. We have observed that on simply heating some of these materials they undergo structural transformations accompanied by colour changes.
It is not possible to synthesize these new materials any other way. Gas/solid and liquid/solid adsorption and immersion calorimetric measurements indicate how efficient these new materials are to adsorb gases such as hydrogen, for example. By varying the metal complexes used to construct these new materials we hope that other physical properties can be incorporated, such as, ferro-magnetism, non-linear optical properties, fluorescence, or chiral separation.