posted
By the way, when I was creating this thread, I googled to find out the surface area of a tennis court, since the article just said that a gram of this crystal had an interior area equivalent to the surface area of 17 tennis courts, but didn't give an actual measurment. From my googling, I accidentally found out that the human lung has an interior area of 70 meters squrared, which is approximately that of the surface area of a tennis court. Isn't that interesting?
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posted
For some reason (probably Biology in the dim recesses of my memory) I knew that about the surface area of our lungs being the size of a tennis court. The small intestine surface area is the size of a baseball diamond.
posted
I'm not sure Dagonee--all the article says on the subject is
quote:The molecules are positioned at the vertices of the tetrahedral zinc oxide-based complexes, an arrangement that yields a very high surface area relative to the crystal's volume.
I tried to find the corresponding article in Nature, in hopes that it would have more information, but either it isn't on their website or I'm just missing it.
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posted
Wouldn't the crystal have to be hollow to have an interior surface area? Otherwise, I would guess that the internal would match exactly the external surface area.
Think of a flaky pastry. All those layers have surface areas. The more layers, the more surface area on the interior of a pastry.
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posted
I see. So something like an onion would have a very large internal surface area, when compared with its actual surface area?
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posted
It all depends on the scale you look at it at, actually.
From the article desriptions, this substance has a very high surface area on the scale of molecular bonds -- on a larger scale it may effectively be solid, somewhat like certain kinds of rocks have larger holes and others have smaller holes -- sometimes so small you can't see them but still large enough to pass water through. The rocks with the holes you can't see generally have more surface area (lots of tiny holes) if you're at that scale. If you're at a larger scale, then the rock doesn't have much/any internal surface area because the holes aren't under consideration.
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quote:The substance's capaciousness should make it extremely useful as a molecular trap for large molecules, such as pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals....
"MOF-177 has really spectacular properties," says Pierre Jacobs, a chemist at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He says the major breakthrough is that the holes within the crystal are large enough to accommodate relatively large molecules, more than one nanometre across.
It could therefore be used to separate different molecules during the chemical manufacture of compounds such as pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals or buckyballs. MOF-177, or related substances, could also find a role as a molecular sponge for storing hydrogen in fuel cells for vehicles, Jacobs suggests
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Did you know that if you took all the veins and arteries from a 6 foot man, and laid them end to end, he would die?
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