Research Projects

Human activities have significant impacts on health, safety, and the environment, necessitating solutions to address sustainable development goals set by the UN. Key issues include the impact of CO2 emissions on climate change, the need for environmentally benign polymers, and the identification, sequestration, or conversion of pollutants into useful products. Porous materials like zeolites are ideal, but their rigidity makes them less suitable for catalytic and sensing applications. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) or porous coordination polymers (PCPs) are excellent alternatives for gas storage, separations, sensing, and catalysis. However, they lack water stability, making their utility limited to moisture-free applications. To address this, water-stable MOFs are made by taking high-charge density cations and/or organic ligands with complex carboxylic acids, incorporating more organic moieties to the surface. Recent research has developed robust multi-functional cuboctahedral In/Cu-MOFs using imidazole-based multi-carboxylic acids and metal clusters. These MOFs are highly stable even under boiling water, and have been used for sensing explosives in water mediums and Lewis acid-catalyzed organic synthesis. The researchers are interested in preparing MOFs containing earth-abundant metal ions, such as Mg, Ca, Al, and Zn, which are effective Lewis acids in converting cyclic epoxides to polycarbonates. This approach will help meet the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) goals by utilizing CO2 for cyclic carbonate, which is widely used for bio-plastics, medicinal/industrial applications, and batteries. The luminescence properties of the embedded ligand in MOFs will also be utilized to detect explosives in an aqueous medium.