(128a) On the Flexibility of Porous Materials

In this plenary session we celebrate and commemorate contributions of Prof. Peter Monson to the field of adsorption in porous materials. They are numerous, ranging from phase equilibria under confinement to water adsorption in activated carbons to connectivity effects and adsorption hysteresis. What unites all these themes is the elegance and often simplicity of the employed models to explain complex behaviour and intricate thermodynamics of fluids in porous structures.

Inspired by this approach, my group has been working on several problems in the field of adsorption in porous materials. In this talk, I will focus specifically on developing simple mechanical models to explain flexibility and structural changes in several classes of crystalline porous materials. In the most recent developments, we employed classical density functional theory as an efficient tool to explore complex free energy landscapes and emerging structural transitions in porous materials as a result of adsorption processes.