Simple fabrication of flexible catalytic elements/electrodes
The ability to melt selected representative materials from the extremely diverse family of metal-organic frameworks has opened up various interesting possibilities of application. One can, for example, prepare metal-organic glasses with tuneable chemical properties or microporosity, or manufacture composites of such glasses with other types of materials and in this way enhance the desired properties (as in a recently presented case of composites of metal-organic glasses and perovskite nanocrystals). In a recent new study, the authors have applied metal-organic glass to a flexible carbon cloth. The preparation was very simple. The cloth was attached to the inner wall of the ball-mill jar and the crystalline powder of the selected metal-organic framework material was added. After the milled nanocrystals had evenly spread over the substrate, the obtained decorated cloth was heated to a temperature just above the melting temperature of the metal-organic material, and the obtained melt covered the fibres of the carbon cloth. The step was followed by quench cooling. Because the metal-organic melt, or more precisely the metal-imidazolate melt is very reactive due to the abundance of broken metal-imidazolate bonds, the described procedure enables also very easy preparation of metal-organic layer with two or more different metals. For example, the authors have prepared a cloth covered with Co-Fe imidazolate glass. It has turned out that such a flexible cloth is very catalytically active. Andraž Krajnc and Gregor Mali from The Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Technology of our institute participated in the study. They employed 1H and 13C magic-angle spinning NMR measurements to inspect the interaction between the metal-organic glass and the carbon fibres. The work was described in an article published in Angewandte Chemie.
ONLINE LINK
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202112880
CONTACT PERSON: gregor.mali(at)ki.si