Locking Effect in Metal@MOF with Superior Stability for Highly Chemoselective Catalysis

Ultrasmall metal nanoparticles (NPs) show high catalytic activity in heterogeneous catalysis but are prone to reunion and loss during the catalytic process, resulting in low chemoselectivity and poor efficiency. Herein, a locking effect strategy is proposed to synthesize high-loading and ultrafine metal NPs in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for efficient chemoselective catalysis with high stability. Briefly, the MOF ZIF-90 with aldehyde groups cooperating with diamine chains via aldimine condensation was interlocked, which was employed to confine in situ formation of Au NPs, denoted as Au@L-ZIF-90. The optimized Au@La-ZIF-90 has highly dispersed Au NPs (2.60 ± 0.81 nm) with a loading amount around 22 wt % and shows a great performance toward 3-aminophenylacetylene (3-APA) from the selective hydrogenation of 3-nitrophenylacetylene (3-NPA) with a high yield (99%) and excellent durability (over 20 cycles), far superior to contrast catalysts without chains locking and other reported catalysts. In addition, experimental characterization and systematic density functional theory calculations further demonstrate that the locked MOF modulates the charge of Au nanoparticles, making them highly specific for nitro group hydrogenation to obtain 3-APA with high selectivity (99%). Furthermore, this locking effect strategy is also applicable to other metal nanoparticles confined in a variety of MOFs, and all of these catalysts locked with chains show great selectivity (≥90%) of 3-APA. The proposed strategy in this work provides a novel and universal method for precise control of the inherent activity of accessible metal nanoparticles with a programmable MOF microenvironment toward highly specific catalysis.