The enhanced dyes removal and catalytic property for nanofused structural chromium-benzenedicarboxylate metal-organic framework

MIL-101(Cr) can be tailored by using different modulators in the synthesis to obtain several morphological variants, including micro-sized MIL-101(Cr) (M-MIL), nano-sized MIL-101(Cr) (N-MIL) and nanofused hierarchical porous MIL-101(Cr) (H-MIL). Though those MILs had comparable porosity, H-MIL possessed remarkable higher adsorption capacity toward the anionic dye Congo red (CR, 1467 mg/g) and cationic dye methylene blue (MB, 301 mg/g) than the other two samples. Furthermore, in the cyanosilylation reaction, H-MIL also revealed significantly enhanced catalytic activity (yield ∼ 95.1%). Thus, the outstanding performance of H-MIL could be attributed to its hierarchically porous structure which accelerated the mass transfer rate and exposed more catalytic active sites.