(619g) Fabrication of Metal-Organic Framwork Nanosheets@Cellulose Composites As Adsorbents for Organic Solvent Recovery

Metal-organic frameworks have been widely used in gas-based adsorption, storage and separation due to their large micropore volume. In this work, we demonstrated the utilization of coordinatively unsaturated metal sites of MOFs to adsorb organic molecules that are larger than the pores of MOFs in organic solvents. Firstly, successful growth of MOF nanosheets on cellulose monolith (MOF_NS@CL) was achieved by controlling the heterogeneous nucleation and growth based on proper selections of temperature, solvents and additional base. Four commonly used dyes were used to investigate the adsorption performance of MOF_NS@CL composites. It was found that the obtained composites showed selective adsorption of rose bengal and methyl orange over crystal violet and methylene blue. X-ray diffraction results unveiled the structure change upon dye adsorption, indicating the coordinatively unsaturated copper center played a key role in selective dye adsorption. The mechanism underlying the adsorption of organic molecules over MOFs could be helpful in designing new types of MOF-based materials for sensing, enzyme immobilization and catalysis.