Commercialization of Metal-Organic Frameworks: MOFs Moves to Market

Since the discovery and development of the first Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) by Kinoshita and co-workers in 1954 research into MOFs has gathered momentum due to their potential applications. In early 1990s Richard Robson at the University of Melbourne proposed the idea of nodes and spaces, almost four decades later, before exploring applications of MOFs. It was about late 1990s scientist began to synthesis MOFs for applications, and then rapidly this filed accelerated. Now, more than 20000 MOFs have been fabricated with some fascinating ligands and a wide range of transition, main group metals, lantanas and actinides with the surface area of 7000 m2/g, to compare about 200 zeolites. To put that in context, other porous materials such as zeolites, mesoporous silica, and carbon their surface area max out at around 1000 m2/g.