Surfactant-assisted fabrication of particle assemblies altering the adsorption-induced structural changes of flexible MOFs

Abstract The structural flexibility of metal–organic frameworks is influenced not only by composition and topology but also by particle aggregation states. Here we investigated the flexibility of MOF assemblies fabricated by a simple surfactant-assisted method without specialized equipment. The structural changes of [Cu(NMe2-ipa)] upon CO2 adsorption were suppressed in a regularly oriented monolayer assembly, whereas those in a randomly oriented multilayer assembly were similar to bulk powders, demonstrating that particle assembly is a practical technique for tuning MOF flexibility.