Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), composed of coordinated metal ions and organic linkers, are an intriguing class of crystalline porous materials. The potential applications of MOFs can be developed by encapsulating functional species (metal nanoparticles (NPs)) within frameworks. Core-shell metal NPs@MOFs, combining the tailorable properties of MOFs and the functionality of metal particles, are attractive for biomedical, electronic and catalytic applications. Versatile strategies of synthesizing NPs@MOFs have been reported, while the well controlling crystallinity of MOF shell, confining metal NPs within MOF frames, and understanding the dynamic process during the formation process, especially the role of surfactants, remain big challenges. In our work, i) a controlled encapsulation strategy was employed to incorporate one metal NP protected by capping agents into single crystalline Zeolite-Imidazolate Framework-8 (ZIF-8).<sup>1</sup> This one-to-one structure could be achieved by introducing different shapes and kinds of metal NPs, with alignment between metal NP and ZIF-8 shell. ii) By studying the dynamic formation process, we found that surfactants dissociated from metal NPs surface under encapsulation condition, which resulted in direct contact between metal NPs and ZIF-8. And the amount of surfactants plays an important role in the formation of Metal NP@Single-ZIF-8.

Encapsulation of single metal nano-particle in single-crystalline MOFs by controlling surfactants at interface

256th National Meeting (2018)

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