Aqueous Synthesis of UiO-66 Metal-Organic Frameworks With Enhanced Crystallinity and Surface Area

Abstract

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as critical and powerful materials for applications requiring a high surface area and tunable chemistries, including CO2 capture, energy harvesting, and catalytic applications. However, despite the broad interest in MOFs, their translation from lab scale to industrial scale production is stymied due to expensive and toxic solvents such as N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF). Thus, transitioning to green chemistry methods for MOF synthesis using inexpensive and benign solvents is imperative to translate MOFs for real-world applications. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, the use of such benign solvents leads to MOFs with significantly inferior p..