Design and syntheses of hybrid zeolitic imidazolate frameworks

Zeolites are widely used in industrial catalysis and many aspects of our daily life. Zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) have been developed by mimicking the structural characteristics of zeolite through coordination chemistry method. ZIFs have attracted extensive attention because of their high surface area and adjustable pore size and pore environment. The emerging hybrid zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (HZIFs) contain TO4 unit of zeolite and metal-imidazole tetrahedral unit (MIm4) of ZIFs which fill the gap between zeolite and ZIFs. HZIFs inherit the merits of zeolite and ZIFs such as high stability, high porosity and so on. HZIFs has wide applications in electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, ion storage, capacitors, electrochemical identification, microwave adsorption and so on. The emergence of this material has greatly promoted the progress and development of material chemistry, coordination chemistry and structural chemistry. In this review, we systematically summarize the development of HZIFs including material design, structural diversity, synthesis methods, morphology control/derivatization and their multi-field applications. The challenges and perspectives of the rational design and syntheses of new HZIFs are also discussed.