Improve the Conductivity of CuBTC by in‐situ Reduction to Core‐Shell CuTCNQ@CuBTC

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs) have been widely used in the fields of hydrogen storage, gas separation, catalysts, and so on. It is inspiring to apply MOFs in the field of electrochemistry, whereas the intrinsic low electric conductivity of MOFs limits their promising future. Herein, a new approach to improve the electronic conductivity of Cu‐MOF (CuBTC) is developed, by adopting LiTCNQ solution as the reductant to generate CuTCNQ@CuBTC (BTC=1,3,5‐benzenetricarboxylic acid; TCNQ=7,7,8,8‐tetracyanoquinodimethane) core‐shell nanoparticles with conductive CuTCNQ as the shell and non‐conductive CuBTC as the core, and the reaction conditions are optimized. Mutually validated data indicate that conductive CuTCNQ shell grows thicker with a higher temperature (60 °C) and prolonged time (24 h). With this method, the conductivity of the CuBTC material is effectively improved from 3.84×10−9 to 2.94×10−7 S cm−1.