Post-synthetic modification of a metal-organic framework based on 5-aminoisophthalic acid for mercury sorption

Abstract A copper metal-organic framework (MOF) based on 5-aminoisophthalic acid has been properly modified, obtaining a desired porous framework with open metal sites (OMSs). Thiol-functionalization of the resulting MOF was achieved by grafting dithioglycol onto OMSs through coordination bonding, which was characterized by PXRD, FTIR, TGA, EDX and XPS. Mercury sorption studies have shown that SH@Cu-MOF exhibited good behaviour for removal of mercury species not only in solution (for Hg2+) but also in vapor (for Hg0).