Carbon-Based Nanoporous Homochiral MOF as a Highly Efficient Platform for Chiral Recognition and Enantioselective Electrooxidation

Abstract

Even though great progress has been made in the development of electrocatalysts, still a great challenge persists in the design of chiral-based enantiospecific catalysts. Herein, we prepared an enantioselective carbon-based nanoporous homochiral MOF from camphoric acid (D- or LCAM) [Cu₂(DCAM)₂(DABCO)] templated on a nickel foam substrate and subsequently loaded Pt on the prepared sample by the postsynthetic method. The obtained chiral thin-film template was found to be highly ordered [001] due to the self-assembly of the MOF by the automatic LPE method. DMOF/Pt-600@NF was used as a precursor for the calcination of a chiral nanoporous material. The DMOF/Pt-600 grown on Ni foam with 40 cycles and calcined at 600 °C for 3 h exhibited superior electrooxidation performance with excellent enantiorecognition capability and enantioselective oxidation of R/S-2-butanol with remarkable stability compared to commercial Pt/C. Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry (CV), and chronoamperometry experiments were conducted to determine the existence of chiral motifs in the synthesized nanoporous thin film. This work gives new insight into understanding the effect of highly ordered chiral structures, which is useful in enantioselective chemistry. These results could be the gateway to facilitate the development of advanced chiral material-based analytical tools that will be used in a variety of applications in bio/pharmaceutical quality control, environmental monitoring, food and beverage industries that address the poor selectivity issues in chiral detection, and butanol fuel cell industries.