Metal Organic Frameworks: Synthesis and Applications

Abstract

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are a recently identified new class of hybrid porous material, consisting of metal ions or cluster linked together by organic bridging ligands. MOFs have been shown tremendous potential in adsorptive separation application and gas storage owing to some of their extraordinary features in terms of specific area, pore volume, low to moderate heat of adsorption and fairly uniform pore size distribution. This project work is focused on the synthesis and characterization of different MOFs and their application in adsorptive separations. MOFs are crystalline compound consisting of metal ions/cluster coordinated to often rigid organic molecules to form one, two, three dimensional structures that can be porous. The pore size and surface properties of these materials can be tuned to a great extent with relative ease by choosing appropriate metal centers and organic ligands. MOFs have got advantages over existing porous materials and zeolite. They possess a wide array of potential applications including materials for gas storage, gas/vapor separation, catalysis, luminescence, and drug delivery. As an explorative study of various MOFs using different metal precursor and ligand have done based on solvothermal methods. Mostly 1,4-benzenedicarboxylic acid(BDC) and 1,3,5-benzenetricarboxylic acid(BTC) based MOFs were synthesized. Various characterization techniques were applied to study the properties of these MOFs. And then after catalytic studiesusing MOF materials, as heterogeneous catalysts in organic transformation reactions were performed. Also adsorption studies were carried out for sulfur containing compound. The adsorbent was found to be dependent on concentration of adsorbate by keeping adsorbent constant.