Metal–Organic Frameworks and Their Composites for Environmental Applications

Abstract

From the point of view of the ecological environment, contaminants such as heavy metal ions or toxic gases have caused harmful impacts on the environment and human health, and overcoming these adverse effects remains a serious and important task. Very recent, highly crystalline porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), with tailorable chemistry and excellent chemical stability, have shown promising properties in the field of removing various hazardous pollutants. This review concentrates on the recent progress of MOFs and MOF-based materials and their exploit in environmental applications, mainly including water treatment and gas storage and separation. Finally, challenges and trends of MOFs and MOF-based materials for future developments are discussed and explored.

Functionalized metal–organic frameworks for heavy metal ion removal from water

“…Advanced adsorbents are expected to have a high surface area, typically greater than 1000 m 2 g −1 ; high water and chemical stability over the entire pH range; and the ability to be functionalized on demand. 4,5 Thus, advanced adsorbents are typically synthetic porous materials functionalized with specific chelating groups. The advantages of bottom-up synthetic porous materials include the fact that their pore sizes, surface areas, and chelating groups can be tuned to capture specific heavy metal ions.…”

“…However, most of these studies have focused on the embedding of MOFs into matrices to form composites for water purification. 4,[22][23][24][25][26][27] Other studies have focused on using MOFs for the photocatalytic degradation of organic and inorganic pollutants 28,29 or electrochemical detection of heavy metal ions. 30 Zhang et al analyzed the use of water-stable MOFs for water purification, partly covering ligand characteristics.…”

Biologically Inspired Small Herbal Biomolecules and Biomass Carbon for High-Performance Supercapacitors

“…Enhanced renewable energy storage technologies are urgently required to support the rapid development of next-generation green and sustainable energy storage systems with high performance. − Among all renewable power supply candidates, biomass-based supercapacitors have been widely developed as a promising class of energy storage devices to satisfy the increasing green and sustainable demand. Their electrodes are composed of redox biomolecules or porous carbon derived from renewable biomass materials. − Man-made organic materials based on biomolecules with redox activities have received significant attention for the fabrication of advanced and sustainable energy storage devices, inspired by the mimic redox activities of small biomolecules. ,− Redox-active biomolecules (such as lawsone, juglone, and riboflavin) have been extensively studied for their ability to store and transfer electrons, protons, sodium ions, lithium ions, and related electrons in supercapacitors and other energy storage devices. ,− In this regard, biomolecule-based electrodes derived from biomass resources are appealing candidates due to their renewability, sustainability, structural flexibility, and chemical diversity in natural systems, and they represent an appealing and emerging paradigm in green and sustainable energy storage applications. − …”

Structure Transformation and Morphologic Modulation of Supramolecular Frameworks for Nanoseparation and Enzyme Loading

“…While bearing structural flexibility for processing into devices and materials conveniently, the regular pores within 2D assemblies in SFs also bring about important potentials in size control, adsorption, separation, drug carrier, and so forth. [2][3][4] In contrast to mono-/double-connecting bonds in the fabrication of various frameworks, the framework structures fabricating via more driving forces between molecular components become possible to bring more abundant features and functionalities. [5,6] Such a design also enables the driving forces in different dimensions to control the structure independently, and can provide a new assembly method from building units to bulk frameworks, which is different from the well-known coordination/covalent frameworks.…”