Chapter 6: Metal-organic Frameworks with Tunable Electrical and Optical Properties
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Published:05 May 2017
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Special Collection: 2017 ebook collection
N. Nidamanuri and S. Saha, in Functional Supramolecular Materials: From Surfaces to MOFs, ed. R. Banerjee, The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2017, ch. 6, pp. 217-246.
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The growing energy demand and the urgency to mitigate anthropogenic strains on our health and environment have created a need for smart functional materials that can produce, transport, and store energy; improve energy efficiency of devices; catalyse reactions; detect and remedy harmful chemicals; and address key challenges in energy, environment, and healthcare. Self-assembled from metal clusters and organic ligands, highly ordered hybrid porous materials known as MOFs endowed with unparalleled chemical and structural tunability and size-selective guest inclusion capability are uniquely positioned to satisfy many of these demands. While their applications in gas storage, catalysis, and drug-delivery have been appreciated for a long time, the manifestation and implementation of their electronic and optical properties were remarkably sluggish. Owing to an increasing attention to these areas, new electronic and photonic MOFs are beginning to emerge with great regularity. In this chapter we outline the longstanding challenges en route to electronic and photonic MOFs, and then provide a comprehensive overview of how these challenges are being addressed using successful examples of electrically conducting and optically tunable MOFs developed in recent years. We will describe MOFs that are designed to have intrinsic electronic conductivity and contrast them with those display guest-dependent tunable conductivity. Electronic MOFs will be followed by optically tunable MOFs that display fascinating capabilities. It is therefore expected that adaptive MOFs can be exploited as sensors, semiconductors, battery electrolytes, light harvesting and emitting materials, and enable a range of new technologies.