Engineering Bio-Inspired MOFs for Sustainable CO₂ capture

Carbon dioxide (CO2), a primary greenhouse gas contributing to global warming, requires efficient capture technologies for successful decarbonisation efforts. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as promising materials for CO2 capture due to tunable pore chemistry and high surface areas. While amine-functionalized MOFs demonstrate excellent CO2 adsorption capacity through chemical sorption, they suffer from high regeneration energy requirements and limited recyclability. We have recently developed a novel and versatile approach for incorporating multivariate nickel clusters into the highly flexible iron(III) oxocluster dicarboxylates MIL-88 structure types, followed by post-synthetic modification to introduce metal-hydroxyl (Ni–OH) moieties mimicking the CO2 fixation of carbonic anhydrases. This biomimetic partitioning design has resulted in significantly enhanced CO2 adsorption performance while enabling the framework to maintain a high permanent porosity upon desorption.