Design and Development of White-Light-Emitting Metal-Organic Frameworks

The growth and modernization of developing nation over the next few decades will continue to raises the energy crisis. It is becoming more and more serious concern about the reduction and the environmental contamination associated with fossil fuels burning. It is a major challenge to resolve the energy and environmental crisis. The energy consumption is rising globally and several green energy thoughts are blooming. Hence, technologies should be developed to reduce such emissions and to ensure clean energy. Lighting is one of the largest energy consumption in recent time. The lighting and display screen with light-emitting diodes (LED) changed the world by reducing energy consumption and improving luminous efficacy. The LED lighting market is expected to rise very rapidly in the Kingdom in the next ten years. The Kingdom drives for conserve energy and reduces ineffective lighting by adopting LED technology with dynamic lighting and adjustable white light. It very highly challenges to improve the performance of white LED. The present mercury based white light LED rises various environmental concerns. Therefore, it is important to develop more environment friendly, energy efficient, white phosphor materials for white LED (WLEDs). Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are promptly emerging solid-state materials that deliver the unlimited prospect for fabricating their physical and chemical properties. These solid materials have fascinated growing scientific and industrial attention due to their broad usages such as catalysis, gas capture and storage, membranes, organic electronics, and drug delivery, etc. These solids are made by assembling metal ion or metal clusters with multidentate organic ligands especially carboxylates. Most important distinctive properties of the MOFs is its relatively large specific surface area. The specific surface area, pore size distribution and framework diversity can be tuned by using different various metal ions and organic linkers. MOFs are getting high demanding research attention in the area of the luminescent sensors. They have unique properties for luminescent based application due to light-emissive organic linkers and various metal centers. This also allows efficient tuning of the emission properties. Although several luminescent MOFs have been reported, it is still a challenge to produce high-performance white-light-emitting MOFs for solid-state lighting application. Identifying the best white-light-emitting materials will, among the many benefits, develop the innovative lighting technologies, and improve energy crisis. In this project, we propose to design and construct MOFs for white-light emission. The main focus will be the development of strategies for the design and synthesis of MOFs with highly luminescent and tunable through white-light. The highly emissive linkers will be designed and synthesized. The luminescent properties, life-time, decay measurements, stability of these materials will be identified. The main goal of this proposal is to design and develop luminescent metal-organic frameworks as white-light-emitting materials to reduce energy consumption and improving the lighting. To achieve this, we will use various inorganic metal centers and organic linkers that mediate ligand to metal or metal to ligand charge transfer. The proposed project also involves encapsulation of lanthanide metal ions in appropriately selected MOFs to tune towards WLE MOFs. The proposed project leads to the development of innovative technologies to improve energy consumption and improve lighting in the Kingdom. This innovative technology may provide energy security to the Kingdom.