The Road to MOF-Related Functional Materials and Beyond: Desire, Design, Decoration, and Development

Abstract

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are known as a class of porous coordination polymers, have proven to be of great significance to manifold applications, owing to their fascinating topology, ultrahigh porosity, enormous internal surface area, and the combination of being as rigid as inorganic materials and as flexible as organic materials . In this review, we give a concise history of the development of MOFs as functional materials prior to our entry into this area in 2006, then a summary of our road to participate in and extend the outline of the research in MOFs chemistry, as well as the challenge in further designing applicable functional materials. We describe not only the road of evolution from the past, present, and future of this chemistry, but also the road to finalize a functional material from the desire to the design, synthesis, and postmodification of a MOF. Throughout the review, we particularly emphasize the improvements in the application of MOFs as heterogeneous catalysts, such as employing MOFs as one component for the construction of composites, and their extended scope in tough catalytic reactions. Examples of applications in gas storage and separation, small molecular sensing, and our perspectives for future applications triggered by MOFs, are also introduced.

Current Trends in the Application of Nanomaterials for the Removal of Emerging Micropollutants and Pathogens from Water

“…The composite materials have superior properties, compared with those of their individual components. They are porous solids of highly designable, ordered and crystalline nature, composed of coordination bonds between metal ions and organic ligands, characterized by large internal surface areas, thus with a significant potential to incorporate a large number of accessible catalytic sites [90][91][92][93][94]. The pores of these materials can be fine-tuned in order to obtain the desired properties due to the elevated tunability of their synthesis.…”

Recent Advances in Metal–Organic Frameworks Derived Nanocomposites for Photocatalytic Applications in Energy and Environment

“…The morphology of these self‐templated MOFs stems solely from the reticular structure formed by the coordination bonds between metal clusters and organic linkers, which do not change after the introducing of guest species. [ 11 , 63 , 64 ] These self‐templated MOFs can readily replicate their morphologies into the MOF derived nanocomposites. As for the external‐templated MOFs, they primarily consist of composite MOFs combined with other materials.…”

“…[ 14 , 67 ] By carefully choosing the suitable MOF precursors, a variety of 0D, 1D, 2D, and 3D nanomaterials that possess robust structural and chemical stabilities, desired morphologies, adjustable textural properties and various surface functionalities can be derived. [ 11 , 36 , 53 , 55 , 68 , 69 ] In addition, the crystallite sizes, morphologies, chemical compositions, atomic and weight percentages and optimized crystalline phases of the resultant nanocomposites can be readily controlled by tuning the pyrolysis conditions including temperature, dwell time, heating rate and gaseous atmosphere. [ 44 , 48 , 70 ] Compared with the conventional approaches to prepare photocatalysts, the carbonization of MOF precursor method not only offers a simple way to control the derivatives, but also shows a great advantage of in situ modification of the textural, electronic and semiconducting properties of the resulting materials, which are crucial to obtain high performance photocatalysts.…”

“…[ 9 , 10 ] Later, MOFs were widely investigated for other applications such as sensing, energy storage and conversion, drug delivery, optoelectronics, batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells and catalysis. [ 5 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ] Since the past few years, MOFs have further been used in solar energy‐driven applications especially as photocatalysts for H 2 evolution (by water splitting), dye degradation and CO 2 reduction. [ 16 , 18 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ] The moderate strength of coordination bonds between the metal nodes and organic ligands, the wide energy bandgaps and the poor semiconducting properties (with limited electric charge generation and charge transfer) of pristine MOFs make them less favorable to be directly employed in photocatalytic applications.…”

Synthesis, Structure and Properties of Formamidine‐templated Metal Formate Crystals

“…Hybrid metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted a lot of attention due to their interesting structure architecture and various potential applications, such as gas absorption and separation, sensor, drug delivery, and catalyst . MOFs are crystalline coordination polymers built up from two main building blocks with the inorganic metal ions as the centers and the organic ligands as linkers and a third guest cations as templates .…”