A Review of Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) Materials as an Effective Photocatalyst for Degradation of Organic Pollutants

Water plays a vital role in all aspects of life. In recent years, water pollution has increased due to various organic and inorganic pollutants caused by human activities. Organic pollutants are hard to degrade in nature. Henceforth cost-effective and sustainable approaches are needed to degrade these organic pollutants to purify wastewater. Organic dye is a major source of organic pollutants from coloring industries, which must be removed during water treatment. The photoactive metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) offer an ultimate strategy to construct catalysts to degrade pollutants present in wastewater. Tuning the metal ions/cluster and organic ligands for better photocatalytic activity of MOFs is the need for an hour. This review comprehensively reported various MOFs, their composites, and POM-based MOF materials for the ultimate photo-degradation of various pollutants in the aqueous phase. Furthermore, special mention has been given to POM-based MOF material, which has an advantage over other materials due to their conducting behavior and high stability. A brief discussion on MOF-based photocatalysts is explored using various theoretical approaches such as density functional theory (DFT) and machine learning (ML). Although there are various article dealing with the basic concept of MOF-based photocatalyst but the area of combining design structure-activity with high-performance theoretical analysis have not been discussed in detail yet. Thus, this article eventually paved the way for applying different structural features to modulate hazardous materials’ photodegradation properties toward organic pollutants.