Zeolite materials: Recent discoveries and future prospects

Zeolite chemistry is establishing itself as one of the key areas in the evolution of materials science as a discipline of great importance in both applied and fundamental research. The well-defined crystalline architecture of these molecular sieve materials has made them ideal inorganic oxides and substrate hosts in a rapidly developing effort concerning new techniques in the physical chemistry of solids and the attendant advances in computational chemistry. In turn, there has been an impressive proliferation in the number and type of molecular sieves discovered by research in synthesis. Taken together, these two events augment the prospect of new directions in catalysis and selective separations including the development of zeolitic materials.