Metal–organic frameworks for heterogeneous photocatalysis of organic dyes

Abstract Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are organic–inorganic porous hybrid crystalline materials with extremely high surface areas and tunable pore sizes. These materials have attracted researchers across the globe for their structural diversity and tunable properties, as well as their well-designed topology. These classes of materials have numerous applications in a number of fields such as sensing, gas storage, gas separation, adsorption, purification and separation of liquid, imaging, drug delivery, heterogeneous catalysis, and so on. Among these wide range of applications of MOFs, many MOFs exhibit photocatalytic activity and are being used as photocatalysts to eliminate organic pollutions such as organic dyes. MOFs containing metals like Co, Ni, Zr, Ti, Al, Cr, Fe, Ce, Tb, Dy, and Zn are being reported to be very impressive as photocatalysts for organic dye degradation. We strongly believe that this chapter will encourage researchers to develop new heterogeneous catalysts based on MOFs to use solar power to degrade toxic organic dyes to mitigate environmental pollution.