Nanoporous Metal Porphyrin Frameworks (MPFs)

The investigation of nanoporous Metal Porphyrin Frameworks (MPFs) for on-board vehicular hydrogen storage is a research project spanning two colleges and four departments at the University of Tennessee. In the Chemistry Department, Dr. Peter Zhang and a post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Ying Chen, are synthesizing MPFs. In the Chemical Engineering Department, Dr. David Keffer, Dr. Brian Edwards, and Ruichang Xiong, a Ph.D. student, are modeling the hydrogen adsorptive capacity of MPFs using molecular simulation. In the Materials Science and Engineering Department, Dr. Claudia Rawn, who holds a joint appointment at ORNL, is using state-of-the-art diffraction facilities at ORNL to characterize the MPF's created by Drs. Zhang and Chen. In the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Dr. Sandeep Agnihotri, plans to measure the hydrogen adsorptive capacity of the synthesized MPFs.