Facile Approach to Graft Ionic Liquid into MOF for Improving the Efficiency of CO 2 Chemical Fixation.

This work describes a facile approach to modify metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with ionic liquids (ILs) rendering them as useful heterogeneous catalysts for CO2 chemical fixation. An amino-functionalized imidazolium based ionic liquid is firmly grafted into the porous MOF, MIL-101-SO3H by the acid-base attraction between positively charged ammonium groups on the IL and negatively charged sulfonate groups from the MOF. Analyses by FT-IR, XPS, 1H-NMR, and N2 sorption experiments reveal the MOF-supported ionic liquid (denoted as IL@MOF) material remains intact while functioning as a recyclable heterogeneous catalyst that can efficiently convert CO2 and epichlorohydrin into chloropropene carbonate without the addition of a co-catalyst.