Functionalized metal-organic frameworks for efficient ethanol to butanol conversion

In the last years, n-butanol has gained increasing attention due to its potential to act as biofuel and to mitigate the environmental impacts associated with transportation. Despite its advantages, there are still challenges that need to be addressed and research and development efforts continue to focus on improving the production efficiency and economic viability of butanol as a biofuel. In this project, we have benefited from reticular chemistry and we have inserted catalytic Pd sites in the pores of the well-known UiO-66 MOF. While our compounds are able to catalyse the ethanol to n-butanol reaction, the available techniques do not allow to determine the precise role of the catalytic sites and the reaction mechanisms. Thus, we propose to use X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) and Powder X-ray Diffraction (PXRD) to gain structural information (quantification of PdII and Pd0 atoms, determination of their environments, etc) on our MOFs.