Ultrafast scale-up synthesis of calcium rod/layer MOFs and luminescence detection of water in organic solvents

Abstract

The practical value of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) which harness great momentum in influencing various fields will be significantly increased if the materials are inexpensive, eco-friendly and can be manufactured at a large scale. Calcium MOFs that satisfy such demands but remain rarely studied in terms of the general applicability of their scale-up synthesis have been investigated in this work. A convenient, low-cost and eco-friendly method for rapid, large-scale synthesis (ca. 80% yield, over 50 000 kg m⁻³ per day within 1 min) has been proposed for the production of seven Ca–MOFs with diverse rod/layer-like building units and overall topologies, including a new one (ROD-94) with a rare underlying net. Moreover, one of the products (ROD-95) has been demonstrated to be capable of detecting and quantitatively measuring the water contents in commercial organic solvents (DMF, EtOH and THF) with LOD values of around 1%, and a fluorescent test paper has been implemented accordingly.