Structured metal-organic frameworks as bottom-up designed photocatalysts.

The increased awareness of environmental pollution and scarcity of natural resources stimulate the development of clean and sustainable processes. An example is photocatalysis, in which the energy of absorbed light is utilized to realize chemical conversions. An often claimed application of this process is the conversion of airborne or dissolved organic pollutants to harmless species. However, current photocatalysts are not very good at capturing these pollutants which are present at very low concentrations in the environment. Moreover, they only absorb a limited fraction of the received energy upon illumination. In this project we intend to develop better photocatalysts based on metal-organic framework (MOF) materials. MOFs are crystalline solids constructed of metal ion nodes bridged by linker molecules, thus forming a porous network. Because of this porosity, MOFs are excellent adsorbents with high affinity for the targeted pollutants. In addition, preliminary results indicate photoactivity in a number of MOFs related to the combined action of the linker molecules and the metal ion nodes. Since MOFs can be constructed from a wide range of such building blocks and since their properties change accordingly, these hybrid materials seems ideally suited for designing photocatalysts by optimizing both adsorption of pollutants and absorption of photons.

Keywords:Catalysis, Photoactivity, Metal-organic framework

Disciplines:Analytical chemistry, Macromolecular and materials chemistry