Published: 18 September 2026
Thomas Dursch
Nature Chemical Engineering volume 3, page488 (2026) Cite this article
Now, Sebastian Henke and co-workers introduce a flux-mediated strategy in which phenanthroline is mixed with a MOF before melting, demonstrating a promising route to MOF glasses with tunable connectivity, most notably cobalt-based MOFs. The authors found that the chelating ligand 1,10-phenanthroline lowered both the melting and glass-transition temperatures, while also suppressing oxidation of the cobalt centers. Furthermore, during melting, phenanthroline competes with native imidazolate linkers for coordination sites on cobalt, meaning that varying the amount of phenanthroline added can effectively control the network connectivity of the resulting MOF glass.
This connectivity-tuning effect was found to be metal-selective: zinc-based frameworks treated with the same flux showed no comparable restructuring. Nonetheless, the authors show that the flux-mediated strategy itself is not cobalt-specific. It also enables the vitrification of copper- and nickel-based MOFs that do not melt or form glasses on their own, although these systems were characterized in less structural detail and do not establish the same degree of connectivity control observed for cobalt.
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