Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) currently receive high interest for cycling water adsorption applications like adsorption heat transformation for air-conditioning purposes. For practical use in adsorption heat pumps (AHPs), the microcrystalline powders must be formulated such that their high porosity and pore accessibility are retained. In this work, the preparation of millimeter-scaled pellets of MIL-160­(Al), Al-fumarate (Basolite A520), UiO-66­(Zr), and Zr-fumarate (MOF-801) is reported by applying the freeze granulation method. The use of poly­(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) as a binder reproducibly resulted in highly stable, uniformly shaped PVA/MOF pellets with 80 wt % MOF loading, with essentially unchanged MOF porosity properties after shaping. The shaped pellets were analyzed for the application in AHPs by water adsorption isotherms, over 1000 water adsorption/desorption cycles, and thermal and mechanical stability tests. Furthermore, the Al-fum pellets were applied in a fixed-bed, full-scale heat exchanger, yielding specific cooling powers from 349 up to 431 W/kg (adsorbent), which outperforms the current commercially used silica gel grains in AHPs under comparable operating conditions.

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In the present work, a direct Z-scheme composite photocatalyst, NH2-MIL-101(Cr)@CuS, with high photodegradation efficiency of Rhodamine B (RhB) degradation in the visible light spectrum, is fabricated through a solvothermal method. It was found that the NH2-MIL-101(Cr)@CuS composite with an appropriate amount of NH2-MIL-101(Cr) exhibited high catalytic performance in the RhB photodegradation. The photocur-rent density and results from the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) analysis confirm the promoted photocatalytic activity of the NH2-MIL-101(Cr)@CuS composite compared to the pristine MIL-101(Cr) and CuS nanoparticles, which were supported by the electron lifetime (τn) calculations for the samples. The trapping ex-periments and Mott-Schottky analysis revealed that the superoxide radicals (•O − 2) played an essential role in the photodegradation of RhB and the promoted photocatalytic activity contributed to a direct Z-scheme mechanism between CuS and NH2-MIL-101(Cr). Stability study also shows acceptable results during photocatalytic reaction. Furthermore, Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations were performed to gain a better understanding of the electronic properties of the NH2-MIL-101(Cr)@CuS nanocomposite. The calculated band structures showed that the nanocomposite has a higher photocatalytic efficiency in the visible region compared to the pristine MIL-101 (Cr) and CuS. The calculated band gap of both the semiconductors and the hybrid nanocomposite confirms the experimental results.