Continuous flow production of metal-organic frameworks

• We survey the methods for making metal organic frameworks at scale.
• Many techniques are found to be bespoke to a particular MOF, contributing to the small number of MOFs available when compared to those known.
• We highlight recent developments in flow chemistry, which is versatile and does not compromise MOF quality.

While thousands of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are known to exist, only a handful are produced commercially. The myriad of potential applications imply that many different MOFs will be required at large scale and versatile production methods could enable this expansion. Continuous flow chemistry is a versatile technique that is compatible with a broad range of laboratory syntheses, with many innovative heating and workup processes, and also with well-established scaled processing methods. With a general synthetic method defined, the state of the art sees a wide and expanding range of MOF materials becoming market-ready in the near future. Key challenges currently lie in increasing processing efficiency, particularly in product work-up.

The number of MOFs produced at scale is tiny when compared to the plethora of known structures (Czaja AU, Trukhan N, Mueller U: Chem Soc Rev 2009, 38:1284–1293).Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slide