Pristine Hollow Metal-Organic Frameworks: Design, Synthesis and Application

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), featuring porous crystalline structures with coordinated metal nodes and organic linkers, have recently found increasing interest in diverse applications. By virtue of their versatile and highly tunable compositions and structures, constructing hollow architectures will further endow MOFs with enhanced properties and designability, exceeding the molecular scale. MOFs could be considered as promising building units to fabricate complex hollow nanocomposites with faster mass transport, multiple active components, more exposed active sites, and better compatibility than bulk MOFs. To construct a promising blueprint for hollow pristine MOFs, this review provides a comprehensive overview for structural design strategies and applications of hollow pristine MOFs. We will highlight the merits, challenges and future potential by structuring and applying MOFs in sensing, separation, storage, catalysis, environmental remediation, photochemical and electrochemical energy conversion. This review might pave a new avenue for future development of novel pristine hollow MOFs.

Automated summary

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), with their versatile and highly tunable compositions and structures, show promise in constructing complex hollow nanocomposites with enhanced properties and designability. They are considered as promising building units for fabricating materials with faster mass transport, multiple active components, more exposed active sites, and better compatibility compared to bulk MOFs.