Advances in Nano-Sized Metal-Organic Frameworks and Biomedical Applications: A Review

Abstract

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted much attention since their discovery and have potential applications in many fields, including gas storage, separation, catalysis, and thermal energy conversion, due to their unique high porosity structure, tunable pore size, and functionalizability. Nano-sized MOFs (NMOFs) possessed both the properties of conventional bulk MOFs and additional physical/chemical properties because of their nanometer size, and thus can exhibit even better performance than related conventional bulk MOFs. In this paper, we introduced the development of NMOFs and presented several classical NMOFs structures and their applications. It also focused on the preparation methods and applications of some important NMOFs in recent years, and provided an outlook on the applications of NMOFs in novel material fields and their development perspective.