A facile method to introduce iron secondary metal centers into metal–organic frameworks

Abstract Herein, we report the successful incorporation of iron (0) species into a 2, 2′-bipyridine functionalized metal–organic framework (MOF) (UiO-67-bpydc). Considering the limited window size of the MOF, the smaller molecule, iron pentacarbonyl was used to introduce iron (0) to coordinate to the backbone of the MOF. The newly generated material contains the iron coordinated linker, Fe(CO) 3 (bpydc), which was supported by a series of characterization techniques. DFT calculation was also used to help understand the structure of the formed complex inside the MOF. The MOF structure remained unchanged after the post-synthetic modification, and the resulted material is a great precursor to generate MOF supported catalyst.