Confinement Self-Assembly of Metal-Organic Cages within Mesoporous Carbon for One-Pot Sequential Reactions

Abstract

Summary Well-defined discrete metal-organic cages have been widely explored in the field of supramolecular catalysis. However, these metal-organic cages have been rarely explored as heterogeneous catalysts for one-pot reactions. Herein, we present the first successful confinement self-assembly of (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-1-yl)oxyl (TEMPO)-containing metal-organic cages within amino-functionalized mesoporous carbon to realize a new family of bifunctional heterogeneous catalyst (Cage@FDU-ED) for one-pot reactions. The orthogonal features of the isolated catalytically active sites within the obtained bifunctional catalyst lead to enhanced catalytic activities, selectivity, and recyclability with the overall transformation yielding up to 96% conversion. These results demonstrate that continuous chemical transformation with high efficiency is possible through careful design of catalytic sites in both metal-organic cages and mesoporous matrix isolatedly. This study paves a new way toward metal-organic cages as a promising platform for heterogeneous sequential reactions.