Ultra‐Fast Degradation of Chemical Warfare Agents Using MOF–Nanofiber Kebabs

Abstract

The threat associated with chemical warfare agents (CWAs) motivates the development of new materials to provide enhanced protection with a reduced burden. Metal-organic frame-works (MOFs) have recently been shown as highly effective catalysts for detoxifying CWAs, but challenges still remain for integrating MOFs into functional filter media and/or protective garments. Herein, we report a series of MOF-nanofiber kebab structures for fast degradation of CWAs. We found TiO coatings deposited via atomic layer deposition (ALD) onto polyamide-6 nanofibers enable the formation of conformal Zr-based MOF thin films including UiO-66, UiO-66-NH , and UiO-67. Cross-sectional TEM images show that these MOF crystals nucleate and grow directly on and around the nanofibers, with strong attachment to the substrates. These MOF-functionalized nanofibers exhibit excellent reactivity for detoxifying CWAs. The half-lives of a CWA simulant compound and nerve agent soman (GD) are as short as 7.3 min and 2.3 min, respectively. These results therefore provide the earliest report of MOF-nanofiber textile composites capable of ultra-fast degradation of CWAs.

Building MOF Nanocomposites with Oxidized Graphitic Carbon Nitride Nanospheres: The Effect of Framework Geometry on the Structural Heterogeneity

“…The diversity of the metal centers and organic ligands leads to materials of particular crystallographic structure, texture, and chemistry. Due to these properties, MOFs have been tested for various applications such as gas separation/storage [4][5][6][7][8][9], purification [10][11][12], sensing [13][14][15][16], electrodes for batteries [17,18], microextraction [19,20], detoxification of chemical warfare agents [21][22][23][24][25], and heterogeneous catalysis [26][27][28].…”

Layer-by-layer decoration of MOFs on electrospun nanofibers

“…8,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] Peterson and Parsons found that Zr-based MOF thin lms could be formed in situ on the TiO 2 coatings, which was deposited via atomic layer deposition onto polyamide-6 electrospun nanobers. 51 Another work presented by Ma and coworkers showed that bimetal ZIFs could directly grow on 2-methylimidazole/PAN electrospun nanober mats, which showed excellent electrocatalytic performance for oxygen reduction reaction aer the carbonization step. 52 Owing to the drawbacks such as time-consuming procedures and high cost of the existing methods, a facile and controllable method is urgently required for the design and fabrication of MOF nanocomposite membrane.…”

Calculations on the unimolecular decomposition of the nerve agent VX

“…1,3 It is, therefore, important to study and mitigate against such synthetic toxic molecules. Numerous researches have been devoted to investigate different methods to degrade V-series agents including, among others, surface sorption, [4][5][6][7] hydrolysis, [8][9][10][11][12] perhydrolysis, 13 novel catalysts, [14][15][16][17][18] binding to metal ions, 19 and incineration. In recent studies, the thermally activated pericyclic H-transfer reaction in gas-phase via a 6-memberedring transition state (TS) has been investigated for the G-series OP nerve agent sarin (GB), 20,21 and for VX simulants.…”