Porous materials: powering the future of energy technologies
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (11/25/2025) – Published in Science on October 30, 2025, an international team of chemists explores the future of efficient energy advancements in “Porous materials: The next frontier in energy technologies.” University of Minnesota Department of Chemistry Professor Andreas Stein is a co-author on the review, which blends chemistry, mechanical engineering, materials science, earth science, and more.
Porous materials are solids that contain a network of pores in a variety of sizes and are made up of two phases. These two phases are called void (the empty pore spaces) and matter (the solid sections). These phases allow the transfer of multiple energy vectors, such as mass, charge, heat, radiation, and pressure. Thanks to their energy transfer capabilities, porous materials are increasingly key in a range of energy applications, driving performance breakthroughs in solar, nuclear, electrochemical, thermal, and subsurface energy extraction and conversion.
The review goes on to highlight how optimizing and tuning pore structure—including the geometry, connectivity, and distribution of pores—can be key in unlocking research breakthroughs. In the last ten years alone, advances in porous materials science have led to innovations in energy storage in batteries, thermoelectric generators, and solar panels, among other things.
At the University of Minnesota, Stein’s group and their collaborators have synthesized porous materials with designed pore structure for applications as electrode materials for lithium ion-batteries that can be charged faster, ion-selective sensors with reduced calibration requirements, and materials for thermal energy storage of waste heat. This team is currently working to develop membranes that rely on porous materials for carbon capture.
The end goal for research into porous materials is to get better at predicting and designing optimal pore structures across the spectrum of energy technologies. “This calls for multiscale computational models and mathematical tools to describe and predict coupled energy transfer processes,” the authors write. “New ideas for synthetic regulation of porosity, such as controlled twisting of packed polymer chains or zeolite exfoliation, require multiscale characterization techniques, including extending computerized tomography or nuclear magnetic resonance cryoporometry to the nanoscale.” Overall, gaining deeper insight into porous material structures will allow chemists, engineers, and materials scientists around the world to harness their true potential.
Farber, E. M.; Seraphim, N.M.; Tamakuwala, K.; Stein, A.; Rücker, M.; Eisenberg, D. “Porous Materials: The Next Frontier in Energy Technology”, Science 2025, 390, eadn9391. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn9391