Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted a great deal of interest from the scientific community in recent years. As MOFs are typically synthesized under mild conditions, they provide an ideal platform for systematic structural design and property tuning at the molecular level. As a result, MOFs have recently been rationally designed and evaluated for a variety of applications, including nonlinear optics, separation, gas storage, chemical sensing, biomedical imaging, drug delivery, and heterogeneous catalysis. The single-crystalline nature of many MOFs allows their structures to be precisely determined by single-crystal X-ray crystallography, providing an ideal platform to study single-site catalysis with solid materials. MOF catalysts can combine advantages of both homogeneous catalysts (such as uniform active sites and excellent selectivities) and heterogeneous catalysts (such as easy catalyst separation, recovery, and reuse). The molecular nature of MOF catalysts also allows systematic engineering of the active sites and/or open channel sizes, enabling detailed delineation of the structure-property relationships in MOF catalysts. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts on designing chiral MOFs for asymmetric reactions and exploring photoactive MOFs for solar energy utilization.
展开▼
