Water-based synthesis of nanoscale hierarchical metal-organic frameworks:Boosting adsorption and catalytic performance

The combination of nano sizes,large pore sizes and green synthesis is recognized as one of the most crucial and challenging problems in constructing metal-organic frameworks(MOFs).Herein,a water-based strategy is proposed for the synthesis of nanoscale hierarchical MOFs(NH-MOFs)with high crystallinity and excellent stability.This approach allows the morphology and porosity of MOFs to be fine tuned,thereby enabling the nanoscale crystal generation and a well-defined hierarchical system.The aqueous solution facilitates rapid nucleation kinetics,and the introduced modulator acts as a deprotonation agent to accelerate the deprotonation of the organic ligand as well as a structure-directing agent(SDA)to guide the formation of hierarchical networks.The assynthesized NH-MOFs(NH-ZIF-67)were assessed as efficient adsorbents and heterogeneous catalysts to facilitate the diffusion of guest molecules,outperforming the parent microZIF-67.This study focuses on understanding the NH-MOF growth rules,which could allow tailor-designing NH-MOFs for various functions.