Our group focuses on synthesizing and characterizing porous materials for applications like water harvesting, air purification, and capturing carbon dioxide. What we're really interested in, is understanding how the size, volume, connectivity, and chemistry of the pores, impact the absorption performance, and then using those insights to inform our work on materials design. So robust characterization techniques are essential.

Characterization is an essential aspect of any porous material research. X-ray diffraction, gas absorption techniques, and thermal analysis techniques are among the top methods for characterization. These can also be used to study structural stability, which is a crucial feature of any material used for real world applications.

Surface area and pore volume are two of the most important properties of porous materials. These properties can be measured using commercially available instruments that operate with established methods and software. Nitrogen as an absorbate is inexpensive, readily available, and safe.

The measurements are quick and reliable.