Sweden’s Uppsala University has revealed a magnesium carbonate material dubbed “impossible” due to its record-breaking surface area.
Called Upsalite and generated out of a mistake in the laboratory, the material has the highest surface area for an alkali metal carbonate at 800 square metres per gram. Consequently, the material has a greater ability to soak up water than the best materials currently on the market, making it ideal to control environmental moisture in electronics and drugs industries, or cleaning up toxic material and oil spills.
The university is now aiming to commercialise Upsalite through Uppsala spin-out, Disruptive Materials.
Maria Stromme, professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala, said: “After having gone through a number of state of the art materials characterization techniques it became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make.
“This places the new material in the exclusive class of porous, high surface area materials including mesoporous silica, zeolites, metal organic frameworks and carbon nanotubes,” said Stromme in a news release. “This together with other unique properties of the discovered impossible material is expected to pave the way for new sustainable products in a number of industrial applications.”
