Designing Functional Metal–Organic Frameworks by Imparting a Hexanuclear Copper-Based Secondary Building Unit Specific Properties: Structural Correlation With Magnetic and Photocatalytic Activity

Abstract

In continuation of our research interest in pyrazole-based multifunctional metal organic frameworks (MOFs), we report here three Cu(II) MOFs using pyrazole and various aromatic carboxylic acid-based ligands. The main theme of interest is to design functional MOFs by imparting a multinuclear metal center as a secondary building unit (SBU). Accordingly, three MOFs are synthesized based on a hexanuclear Cu-pyrazolate unit as the SBU with some intriguing structural networks like (4,4) type herringbone grid or an archetypal Kagomé topology. We have successfully synthesized functional MOFs by incorporating hexanuclear Cu-pyrazolate SBU-specific properties viz. magnetism and catalysis, the central theme of this work. All the MOFs show some photocatalytic degradation of toxic dye molecules. On the other hand, magnetic behaviors of MOF-2 and MOF-3 associated with the Cu6 unit have also been investigated.