Metal Organic Frameworks: An overview and their applications

Abstract

Metal Organic framework (MOFs) chemistry is an emerging field of interest and pervasive in literature due to its architecturally robust structures. The reason why MOFs chemistry is explored at large scale is because of its extensive properties of high porosity, high structural stability, large designing flexibility, enormous internal surface area and many more. Metal organic framework are class of porous solids [1-4] formed when metal ions are coordinated to organic linkers such as phosphonates, sulfonates, polycarboxylates, phenolates. Infinite MOFs can be synthesized as large number of possible combinations can be formed from variety of metal ions and numerous organic linkers. MOF chemistry is ubiquitous since it have great potential application in various fields such as therapeutic agents, biological sensing, semiconductors, methane storage, hydrogen storage, carbon capture and also in catalysis [5, 6]. In comparison to conventional inorganic porous materials such as Zeolites, the flexible porosity and tunable composition keep MOFs far ahead of zeolites.