Water Purification: Adsorption over Metal-Organic Frameworks

Water pollution relating to human beings' health is a universal problem across community society. Highly efficient, economically feasible and easily achievable approaches are long-sought-after for water purification. Adsorption processes with porous materials (e.g. zeolites, activated carbon, silica gel, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)) have drawn much attention in this field during past decades. In it, MOFs with numerous active sites, uniform porosity and tailorable structure diversity are arising to be one of the most promising adsorbents for water purification. During the adsorption processes, influence factors that determine or affect the usability and performances of MOFs are mainly focused on the stability of MOFs, their affinity for contaminants and the conducting conditions (pH, initial concentration of the contaminants). In this review, we will systematically present the performances of MOFs (mainly focused on MOF crystals, MOF nanomaterial or MOF composites will be beyond the scope of this review) for contaminants purification (inorganic and organic contaminants) in water and give a detailed discussion about the connection among their performances, conducting condition factors and potential interaction mechanisms (e.g. electrostatic interactions, coordination or p-p interaction). We hope this review will be beneficial to the design, regeneration and reuse of MOF adsorbents and promote the development of MOFs for water purification.