| Abstract Scope |
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted much attention in the past decades owing to their amazing properties, including rich surface chemistry, flexible structure, superior surface area, and tunable porosity. Endorsed by those features, MOFs find a variety of applications, such as gas capture and separation, catalysis, drug delivery, and sensing. MOFs are conventionally synthesized via wet-chemistry methods, which, however, suffer from long reaction durations, inhomogeneous mixing, and limited batch processes. To address the above issues, we have developed a microdroplet-based nanomanufacturing process to fabricate MOFs-based functional materials with controlled hierarchical nanostructures in the rapid, continuous, and scalable manner. The mechanisms of rapid formation of MOFs inside the microdroplets were investigated by both experimental and theoretical approaches. Further, we have also developed strategies to integrate MOFs with semiconductors to form hybrid photocatalysts for various environmental applications, such as gas adsorption, CO2 photoreduction, and pollutant degradation. The quantitative mechanisms of gas adsorption, activation, and charge transfer within the hybrid nanostructures were explored by various in-situ techniques, such as diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS), photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), coupled with density functional theory (DFT) calculations. |