Applications of water stable metal–organic frameworks

Abstract

The recent advancement of water stable metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) expands the application of this unique porous material. This review article aims at studying their applications in terms of five major areas: adsorption, membrane separation, sensing, catalysis, and proton conduction. These applications are either conducted in a water-containing environment or directly targeted on water treatment processes. The representative and significant studies in each area were comprehensively reviewed and discussed for perspectives, to serve as a reference for researchers working in related areas. At the end, a summary and future outlook on the applications of water stable MOFs are suggested as concluding remarks.

Ultrathin metal-organic framework array for efficient electrocatalytic water splitting

“…Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), constructed by joining metal ions with organic ligands, have emerged as a class of versatile porous materials for a wide range of applications12. However, MOFs are generally considered to be poor electrocatalysts for electrochemical reactions such as the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), the two core processes for electrochemical water splitting345.…”

“…Improvement in catalytic efficiency requires each of these parameters to be optimized, but increasing one of them without compromising the others is difficult. For example, MOFs have abundant intrinsic molecular metal sites, but few of them are utilized for electrocatalysis because of their poor electrical conductivity (usually ∼10 −10  S m −1 )67 and small pore size (usually within several nanometres)1. The recently reported strategies like calcinations at high temperature may sacrifice MOFs' intrinsic molecular metal active sites8, while hybridization with secondary conductive supports (polyaniline9, graphene10 and so on) may block their intrinsic micropores, and the bulk conductive MOF has limited meso- and macro-porosity (tens of nanometres to several micrometres) for effective mass transport during electrocatalysis7.…”

Tuning the Structure and Properties of Lanthanoid Coordination Polymers with an Asymmetric Anilato Ligand

“…In recent years, lanthanides have become very popular for preparing MOFs with luminescence properties that can be used as sensors [15][16][17].…”

Adsorptive removal of herbicides from water over nitrogen-doped carbon obtained from ionic liquid@ZIF-8

“…MOFs [29][30][31] are an emerging class of advanced porous materials [32,33] that attract much attention because of their simple synthesis, high porosity, and potential applications, particularly in liquid-phase adsorption for water and fuel purification [34][35][36][37][38]. However, MOFs have some limitations in aqueous phase adsorption because of their relatively low stability in water and hydrophilic nature [39,40].…”