Recent advances in amide functionalized metal organic frameworks for heterogeneous catalytic applications

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), emerging as a new class of porous crystalline materials, have recently received particular attention towards their prospective application in the area of heterogeneous catalysis. They can be easily used as reusable and size selective catalysts for several organic reactions, owing to their high surface area, interesting structures, low solubility in organic solvents and tunable pore sizes. Moreover, the diverse structures of MOFs provide numerous possibilities to incorporate basic functionalities either via direct synthesis or via modification of their components. In this context, substantial efforts have recently been devoted to construct amide-functionalized MOFs for catalytic applications. Due to the flexible, polarizable, strong guest bonding affinity and basic nature of the amide groups, the resulted MOFs can disclose fascinating structures along with improved gas storage and catalytic properties, a field which experienced a remarkable progress in the last few years. However, the topic of amide functionalized MOFs for heterogeneous catalysis has never been reviewed. Therefore, a review summarizing amide functionalized MOFs for catalytic applications is timely. In this review, we present an overview of the recent progress in amide functionalized MOFs, including our contribution in this area, by covering their synthesis, structure and heterogeneous catalytic applications. Firstly, attention is paid to the various methodologies which have been adopted to prepare amide functionalized MOFs, followed by a discussion on their structural properties. Finally, we focus on their application on various heterogeneous catalytic reactions and photocatalysis. Furthermore, a discussion on the role of a Lewis acid (the metal center) as well as of a Lewis base (the amide group) in the catalytic reactions and typical reported examples of size selective catalysis are presented. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.