Emerging adsorptive removal of azo dye by metal–organic frameworks

• Clean water demand is one of the most important worldwide issues.
• MOFs show great attention for the improvement of adsorption/separation of azo dyes.
• The effectiveness of MOFs adsorbents toward dyes adsorption are reviewed.
• The adsorption mechanism and the applied kinetic and thermodynamic models are discussed.

Adsorptive removal of toxic compounds using advanced porous materials is one of the most attractive approaches. In recent years, the metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a subset of advanced porous nano-structured materials, due to their unique characteristics are showing great promise for better adsorption/separation of various water contaminants. Given the importance of azo dye removal, as an important class of pollutants, this paper aims to review and summarize the recently published research on the effectiveness of various MOFs adsorbents under different physico-chemical process parameters in dyes adsorption. The effect of pH, the adsorption mechanism and the applicability of various adsorption kinetic and thermodynamic models are briefly discussed. Most of the results observed showed that the adsorption kinetic and isotherm of azo dyes onto the MOFs mostly followed the pseudo-second order and Langmuir models respectively. Also, the optimum pH value for the removal of majority of azo dyes by MOFs was observed to be in the range of ∼5–7.