Tailoring functionalities: pore engineering strategies in porous organic cages for diverse applications

Abstract

Porous materials feature high specific surface areas, enhanced mass transfer efficiency, and altered material–guest interactions, significantly impacting their functionality. Pore engineering is a key strategy for developing materials with tailored pore structures and environments. Porous organic cages (POCs) represent a crucial class of these materials, enabling precise integration of building blocks (BBs) to achieve pre-designed pore characteristics. The diversity of BBs, the modular nature of POCs, selectivity of bond forming chemistry and excellent solution processability are helpful for tuning pore structures and offer customized pore environments for specific applications. Herein, we focus on the pore engineering methodology in POCs and summarize the roles of pore engineering in numerous applications, including gas storage and separation, sensing and detection, energy storage and conversion, membrane separation and heterogeneous catalysis.