Solvent Driven Reversible Phase Transition of Pillared Metal-Organic Framework.

During the last decade, the controllable reversible phase transition of functional materials has received growing interest, showing unique performances for various technological applications. Although many metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) possess lamellar structure, the reversible structural transformation of MOFs between three-dimensional (3D) phase and two-dimensional (2D) phase remains a largely unexplored area. Herein, we report for the first time a europium MOFs with unprecedented reversible morphology in the different solvent at room temperature. This europium MOF displayed 3D nanorod-shaped morphology in organic solvent and 2D nanobelts architectures in water, respectively. As a proof of concept for potential applications of this reversible phase transition MOF, we can use this delaminate-recovery method to load dye molecules that could not be loaded initially into the europium MOFs.