Porphyrinic Metal-Organic Frameworks for CO2 Capture and Conversion

Abstract

As an effective strategy to establish a sustainable society, reliable materials and technologies for CO2 capture and conversion are highly required. Due to large surface area, high porosity and tunability, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are promising candidates for CO2 capture and conversion. On one hand, MOFs have been widely used for CO2 adsorption and separation owing to their cavities. On the other hand, the structures and functionality of MOFs are easily tuned, and then the catalytically active centers for CO2 conversion can be incorporated into the framework. Our work herein is concentrated on the synthesis and application of porphyrinic metal-organic frameworks (PMOFs) in CO2 capture and conversion. Catalytic results show that under the visible light (> 400 nm) irradiation without any additional photosensitizer, our PMOFs are powerful to catalyze CO2 reduction to the formate ion with up to 99% selectivity and can be recycled and reused for 3 runs without significant loss of the activity. Furthermore, our PMOFs can promote the cycloaddition of CO2 and epoxides under low CO2 concentrations (e.g. 50%, 30%, 15% and 5%) due to the CO2 concentrating effect from the pore spaces. Figure 1