Metal organic material (MOMs) for environmental, biological and catalytic applications (PhD)

Abstract

Metal organic materials (MOMs) are promising materials incredibly having wide range of utility in various fields such as magnetism, nonlinear optics, displays, gas purification, gas storage, biomedical applications and electroluminescent devices. MOMs are synthesized by connecting the organic moieties to inorganic species via covalent or non covalent interactions. Numerous MOMs have been reported till date including wide range of metals/metal nanoparticles with various organic linkers/macrocycles for diverse applications. However, still there is large scope of design and synthesis of new MOMs for their applications in the fields of environmental and biological science and catalysis. In the present thesis, we have designed and synthesized different types of MOMs including metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and their hybrids, coordination polymers and selfassembled materials of metal nanoparticles and macrocycles particularly calix[4]arenes and thiacalix[4]arenes for diverse applications. The work is distributed in six different chapters from chapter 2 to chapter 7 excluding chapter 1 and chapter 8 which includes introduction and conclusions respectively. One of the new significant areas related to porous MOFs being investigated is immobilization of bio-molecules in its pores. In this context, we have designed and synthesized an ensemble of based MOF. The bio-material selectively senses sulfate ions in 100% aqueous solution and in solid phase with real world application. Further, to explore the utilization of MOMs for recognition of environmentally hazardous molecules, we synthesized a coordination polymer and metal organic xerogel based on pyrene tetrasulfonate and phenanthroline dicarboxylic acid respectively. These two MOMs are utilized as templates for recognition of industrially relevant azo dyes. The real world application of these MOMs as azo dye sensor has been shown by detecting ‘brilliant yellow’ azo dye on fabric and in common food stuffs where azo dyes are used as adulterants. Xerogel is also evaluated for its catalytic activity in Knoevenagel condensation reaction. We further aimed for the biological applications of MOMs. Thus, we designed and synthesized 2,6 naphthalene dicarboxylate (NDC) and quinoline (QN) based Cd(II) coordination polymer {[Cd(NDC)(QN)]}n. The synthesized coordination polymer behaves as synthetic blood anticoagulant. A group of pharmaceuticals called anticoagulants which prevent blood coagulation are developed as medication for disorders like thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, myocardial infarction and strokes. In next and final part of thesis, we have reported new self-assembled materials based on Pd and Ru nanoparticles using thiacalix[4]arenes and calix[4]arenes as templates for catalytic reduction of two environmental pollutants ‘4-nitrophenol’ and ‘brilliant yellow’ azo dye respectively.