Exploitation of Intrinsic Confinement Effects of MOFs in Catalysis

Abstract

In catalysis research the design of bio-inspired,'artificial enzymes‘ is a field of huge interest. These catalysts are distinguished by their high catalytic efficiency resulting from a close proximity of several active sites and secondary substrate-catalyst interactions enabled by functional groups in the catalytic pocket. A class of materials which meets these requirements are metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Here, the pores confine a reaction environment where several functionalities can be incorporated and spatially positioned in a tunable fashion. Recently, a number of reports revealed the importance of such confinement effects for the control of catalytic activity and selectivity by exploiting the intrinsic properties like pore size and neighboring group effects and the alignment and distance of different active sites within one MOF pore. Thus, this concept aims to accentuate the potential of the exploitation of those effects in MOFs for the design of sophisticated catalysts.