Mircea Dinca from MIT says that the reason we don't have hydrogen cars is because the hydrogen can't be efficiently store. He sees other roadblocks to progress as well. CO2 from the atmosphere could be captured and used as a feedstock for chemistry or polymer production, and batteries should have a higher capacity and be easier to charge. These are some of the issues that Mircea is working to address with Metal Organic Frameworks.
Dinca was one of the MIT Technology Review's TR35 innovators in 2012, and in his SolveforX talk "Using Sponges to Improve and Store Alternative Fuels" he gives an overview of his work with Metal Organic Frameworks.
Mircea began with the idea that new energy advances could only move forward if new material advances happened first. He worked to find a material that could store high levels of material and release the material quickly. The sponge was his inspiration for a heavy storage and fast release mechanism.
The sponge pores in a Metal Organic Framework are one nanometer in diameter. Sponges can be customized by manipulating the metal in the framework to store specific compounds. Metal can also be used as a catalyst so instead of only storing the compound it can be transformed within the framework.
Dinca has been working on his sponge frameworks for a decade, and his current research area is the electric properties of the MOFs. He hopes that by increasing the metal's electrical conductivity that new batteries, gas separations and electrocatalysis can take place.
In March 2014 he was accepted into the Cottrell Scholar program as an early career faculty committed to research and teaching. Very exciting to see what happens next with this research and the alternative fuel and electronics possibilities.