Bifunctional MOFs in Heterogeneous Catalysis

The ever-increasing landscape of heterogeneous catalysis, pure and applied, utilizes many different catalysts. Academic insights along with many industrial adaptations paved the way for the growth. In designing a catalyst, it is desirable to have a priori knowledge of what structure needs to be targeted to help in achieving the goal. When focusing on catalysis, one needs to cope with a vast corpus of knowledge and information. The overwhelming desire to exploit catalysis toward commercial ends is irresistible. In today's world, one of the requirements of developing a new catalyst is to address the environmental concerns. The well-established heterogeneous catalysts have microporous structures (<25 Å), which find use in many industrial processes. The metal-organic framework (MOF) compounds, being pursued vigorously during the last two decades, have similar microporosity with well-defined pores and channels. The MOFs possess large surface area and assemble to delicate structural and compositional variations either during the preparation or through postsynthetic modifications (PSMs). The MOFs, in fact, offer excellent scope as simple Lewis acidic, Brönsted acidic, Lewis basic, and more importantly bifunctional (acidic as well as basic) agents for carrying out catalysis. The many advances that happened over the years in biology helped in the design of many good biocatalysts. The tools and techniques (advanced preparative approaches coupled with computational insights), on the other hand, have helped in generating interesting and good inorganic catalysts. In this review, the recent advances in bifunctional catalysis employing MOFs are presented. In doing so, we have concentrated on the developments that happened during the past decade or so.