EC-MOF/Phase-I: A computationally ready database of electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks with high-throughput structural and electronic properties

TL;DR

This paper introduces EC-MOF/Phase-I, a comprehensive database of 1,061 electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks created through high-throughput computational screening to aid accelerated materials discovery.

Contribution

It presents the first extensive, experimentally guided database of EC-MOFs with computed structural and electronic properties for use in device design.

Findings

Database includes 1,061 structures with diverse building blocks.

High-throughput DFT calculations provide optimized geometries and properties.

The platform facilitates rapid selection of EC-MOFs for specific applications.

Abstract

The advent of pi-stacked layered metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) opened up new horizons for designing compact MOF-based devices as they offer unique electrical conductivity on top of permanent porosity and exceptionally high surface area. By taking advantage of the modular nature of these electrically conductive (EC) MOFs, an unlimited number of materials can be created for applications in electronic devices such as battery electrodes, supercapacitors, and spintronics. Permutation of structural building blocks including different metal nodes and organic linkers results in new systems with unprecedented and unexplored physical and chemical properties. With the ultimate goal of providing a platform for accelerated materials design and discovery, here, we lay the foundations towards creation of the first comprehensive database of EC-MOFs with an experimentally guided approach. The first phase of this database, coined EC-MOF/Phase-I, is comprised of 1,061 bulk and mono-layer structures built by all possible combinations of experimentally reported organic linkers, functional groups and metal nodes. A high-throughput screening (HTS) work flow is constructed to implement density functional theory calculations with periodic boundary conditions to optimize the structures and calculate some of their most significantly relevant properties. Since research and development in the area of EC-MOFs has long been suffering from the lack of appropriate initial crystal structures, all the geometries and property data have been made available for the use of the community through the online platform that is developed in the course of this work. This database provides comprehensive physical and chemical data of EC-MOFs as well as convenience of selecting appropriate materials for specific applications, thus, accelerating design and discovery of EC-MOF-based compact devices.