The Dincă lab has spent the last fifteen years focusing on the development of a new class of highly porous materials--metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Although materials in this class have long been proposed for gas storage and separation, MOFs also have promising applications in the chemical industry and exhibit relatively unexplored electronic properties with applications to the storage and consumption of energy. If one were to unfold the internal surface area of one gram of the material, it would cover an entire football field. MOFs have by far the largest surface area of any material known to humankind. Dincă's work on water sorption in MOFs has led to the isolation of particularly tunable “sponges on steroids” that can produce fresh water by absorbing moisture from air and contribute to new air-conditioning (AC) technology with half the energy consumption of traditional ACs.
The basic science that Dincă pursues lays the groundwork for technological advances that can address some of our society’s most challenging problems, and not just in ways that we can predict, such as improving battery technology, reducing the energy footprint of large industrial processes, or extracting atmospheric water, but also in ways that we cannot yet imagine.