Crystalline Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are currently an important kind of advanced functional materials due to their novel coordination structures, diverse topologies, and potential applications.1-5 As one of topical MOFs, porous chromium terephthalate with giant pores labeled MIL-101(Cr) possesses several unique features such as hierarchical pore structure 6 including a mesoporous zeotype architecture, mesoporous cages and microporous windows, outstanding sorption properties, numerous unsaturated metal cation sites, and high hydrothermal and chemical stability. These properties have led to a number of application potential in catalysis, gas storage, drug delivery and adsorptive separation.7-10 One important challenge has to realize is funtionalization via incorporation of binding site or reactive centers for catalysis. The functionalization methods of metal organic frameworks (MOFs) in a wide range of applications are two possible approaches including pre-and postmodification with functional groups.
7,9-15The functionalized pores of MOFs can be used as active sites in base-catalyzed reactions.13,16-19 It was already described on an electrophilic surface functionalization of coordinatively unsaturated metal sites (CUS) with chelating agents or electron-rich molecules. MIL-101(Cr) may thus be finely tuned for catalytic applications in precise conditions. It is known that MIL-101(Cr) possesses two coordinatively unsaturated metal sites (CUS) in a trimeric Cr(III) octahedral cluster (Scheme 1) with terminal water molecules which are removable from the framework under vacuum or in an inert gas flow at 423 K for 12 h. This CUS as Lewis acid sites in the structure was usable for the surface functionalization 7 (Figure 1).Here we further explore the preparation of the aminegrafted MIL-101 as a heterogeneous base catalyst according to a pK a value of the functional diamine group and their catalytic activities in Knoevenagel condensation of benzaldehyde and ethylcynoacetate. The diamine compounds used for the functionalization include ethane-1,2-diamine (ED), butane-1,4-diamine (BD), decane-1,10-diamine (DD) and benzene-1,4-diamine (PD).The XRD patterns of functionalized samples show decrease of intensity. These results provide that the diamines were filled the pores of MIL-101. However, the patterns still show the high-crystalline frameworks and porous structures after functionalization. (Supplementary Materials, Figure S1) The structural details of the pores such as BET surface area, pore volume and pore size are exhibited in Supplementary Materials ( Figure S2 and Table S1).