Organically Templated Metal Sulfates, Selenites and Selenates

Organically-templated metal sulfates, selenites and selenates 

First published as an Advance Article on the web 30th January 2006 DOI 10.1039/bSl 0396g 

The literature on inorganic open-framework materials abounds in the synthesis and characterization of metal silicates, phosphates and carboxylates. Most of these materials have an organic amine as the template. In the last few years, it has been shown that anions such as sulfate, selenite and selenate can also be employed to obtain organically templated open-framework materials. This tutorial review provides an up-to-date survey of organically templated metal sulfates, selenites and selenates, prepared under hydrothermal conditions. The discussion includes one-, two-, and three-dimensional structures of these materials, many of which possess open architectures, The article should be useful to practitioners of inorganic and materials chemistry, besides students and teachers. The article serves to demonstrate how most oxy-anions can be used to build complex structures with metal-oxygen polyhedra. 

Inorganic open-framework compounds constitute an important class of materials that has attracted much attention as evidenced by the vast number of research papers published in the last few years. Although work in this area started with aluminium silicates1,2 because of their important uses in sorption and catalysis, much of the recent work pertains to the structure and characterization of open-framework metal phosphates and carboxylates. Both these families of open-framework materials have been reviewed recently.3 7 Since open-framework silicates and phosphates can essentially be 

Chemistry and Physics of Materials Unit and CSIR Centre of Excellence in Chemistry, Jawaharfal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur i. O Bangalore 560064, India. 

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