Zihui Zhou is currently a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry where he is advised by Professor Omar M. Yaghi. Zihui received a B.S. in Chemistry from Tsinghua University, where he researched on developing MXene-based functional materials for wearable sensors.
Zihui’s doctoral research focuses on designing and synthesizing new covalent organic framework (COF) materials for direct air carbon dioxide capture. This class of crystalline, porous material composed of lightweight organic building blocks linked by strong covalent bonds. Their high surface area, tunable pore size, and chemical stability make them ideal for CO2 capture. By tailoring pore chemistry, COFs can selectively adsorb CO2 even from highly diluted sources like air.
As a Kavli ENSI Fellow, Zihui will focus on understanding CO2 and water sorption structures in COFs to develop advanced direct air capture (DAC) sorbents. Preliminary findings indicate that amine-functionalized COFs exhibit higher CO2 uptake at increased relative humidity. However, the distribution of water and polyamines within the hydrophobic COF—factors that could impact CO2 uptake and guide the design of next-generation DAC materials—remains unexplored. To address this, Zihui will employ solid-state NMR (ssNMR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and FT-IR spectroscopy to characterize the sorption structures of water and CO2 in COFs, paving the way for more efficient CO2 capture materials.