Heavy metals are inorganic pollutants which pose a serious threat to human and environmental safety, and their effective removal is becoming an increasingly urgent issue. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a novel group of crystalline porous materials, which have proven to be promising adsorbents because of their extremely high surface areas, optimizable pore volumes and pore size distributions. This study is a systematic review of the recent research on the removal of several major heavy metal ions by MOFs. Based on the different structures of MOFs, varying adsorption capacity can be achieved, ranging from tens to thousands of milligrams per gram. Many MOFs have shown a high selectivity for their target metal ions. The corresponding mechanisms involved in capturing metal ions are outlined and finally, the challenges and prospects for their practical application are discussed.
Keywords: adsorption; heavy metal ions; metal–organic frameworks.